Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Baroness Warsi Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 20th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I start where my noble friend just ended. Like him, many colleagues and the Minister, I begin by paying tribute to the brave men and women of our Armed Forces, including brave men and women from my own family—from my paternal and maternal grandfathers to my daughter, who once again has chosen a life in uniform and dedicated her life to defending the freedoms and values that we hold precious. It is in this vein that I make my remarks today.

No one can doubt the Government’s stated intentions. I support those stated intentions, but I worry that the Bill as drafted does not. We must always protect our Armed Forces from vexatious claims. Families and lives have been destroyed through such claims, and I would not want my family—indeed, any family—to be on the receiving end of such claims. However, alongside that and in seeking to do so, we must not undermine the very values we seek to protect, including through military action.

Tragically, the wars that form the backdrop to the Bill are often remembered not for what good we achieved but for the harm our intervention unleashed, including the tragic loss of life, torture and sexual violence. Thankfully, much of what I can term rogue behaviour was the action of troops other than UK troops, but sadly, as your Lordships have heard, our young men and women were not immune from conduct that was, at best, unethical and immoral, and, at worst, serious criminal acts leading to death. We have heard examples today. Those individual incidents are appalling singularly, but collectively impact on our reputation and thus, I would say, our military’s ability to function at its most effective in the multiple roles in which we deploy it in these times.

My question for my noble friend is one that has been previously asked: why is sexual violence—rightly, in my view—excluded from the triple lock, but not torture and war crimes: something we, sadly, saw in both Iraq and Afghanistan? My noble friend referred to the unique nature of warfare in her opening remarks and said that this means that in exceptional circumstances the lock will not apply. Torture is, by its very nature, exceptional. It should not have to be deemed as such on a case-by-case basis for the triple lock not to apply, and we certainly should not be providing blanket legal protection. We must be sure that individuals who partake in torture, whoever they may be, have a clear message that such acts will not go unpunished.

It cannot be that absolute accepted positions of our commitment to the Geneva Convention are left unclear by the Bill. Our commitment, over generations, to human rights conventions forms the bedrock of many an argument that we are intervening in places around the world—to protect and promote human rights and to prevent human rights abuses. It would be hard for us to justify such interventions if the first step we take before intervention is to derogate from our own human rights obligations.

What is further troubling is Clause 6(2), which would exempt from the triple lock prosecuting offences committed against members of the Regular Forces or Reserve Forces, members of a British Overseas Territory force, Crown servants and defence contractors. I find this hard to reconcile with our commitment that all are equal before the law. Perhaps my noble friend can explain the reasoning behind why the murder of a fellow British co-worker is more serious than that of, say, an Iraqi or Afghan civilian. Surely the crime cannot be judged differently depending on the victim, rather than the act and intention of the perpetrator.

In 2014, during my time as FCO Minister with responsibility for the International Criminal Court, we were engaged in meetings with the prosecutor Fatou Bensouda about claims of abuse made against our troops in Iraq. In discussions about where these matters would be tried and what role the ICC would play, our strongest argument was our domestic system, both investigations and prosecutions. The Bill may undermine what has been the strongest protection for our Armed Forces: that even those who may have engaged in criminal conduct will be dealt with here, in our courts. We must make sure that, in this Bill, we do not make the error of changing that.