Armed Forces Bill

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, I want to touch today on two matters: first, briefly, Clause 14, a provision which I particularly applaud, while adding, “High time”. I recognise that in practical terms it changes nothing; it merely tidies up the position with regard to homosexuals as it has stood for the past 16 years. It finally crystallises in legislation the change of policy which was forced on the Government by the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in 1999 in Smith and Grady v the United Kingdom: that no longer are members of the Armed Forces engaged in homosexual activity to be administratively discharged from the Armed Forces.

For me, this has involved something of a nostalgic wander down memory lane. In 1995, I presided, at first instance, in the Divisional Court in the case of Smith, widely known as the “gays in the military” case. Of course, that was before the Human Rights Act and before, therefore, the United Kingdom was entitled to have regard to our convention obligations. Reluctantly, therefore, I was bound to reject the complainant’s case, compellingly though it had been argued by Mr David Pannick, Queen’s Counsel, as he then was. So, too, on appeal, presided over by the late and much missed Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the Court of Appeal similarly had to dismiss the claim.

I hope that it is not unforgivably vain to note in passing the opening line of my judgment:

“Lawrence of Arabia would not be welcome in today’s Armed Forces”,

and to record my statement in the judgment that:

“I for my part strongly suspect that so far as this country's international obligations are concerned, the days of this policy are numbered”—

and so it proved to be. Strasbourg’s judgment, correcting what had plainly been the United Kingdom’s stupidly mistaken earlier approach, should not be forgotten by those who seek any wholesale rejection of the convention.

The other matter that I want to touch on today arises not from what appears in the Bill but rather, as many others have noted, what is strikingly absent: anything directed towards solving the real problems resulting from the application of the convention to the operations of our armed services abroad. In this part of my speech—not, I hope, inconsistently—I shall perhaps be a little less respectful towards some of Strasbourg’s jurisprudence.

There are a number of aspects of the problems arising from the convention as applied to our forces abroad, and I cannot pretend that, to some extent at least, they have not been compounded by what many think to be the unfortunate decision of the majority of the Supreme Court in 2013, in another case called Smith, in which, as has already been made plain, by a majority of four to three, the court refused to strike out claims by our service personnel in Iraq under both Article 2 of the convention and in common law negligence. The noble Lord, Lord West, and the noble and gallant Lords, Lord Craig and Lord Boyce, have already touched on that. The actual legal effect of the majority decision in that case has perhaps been a little misunderstood and exaggerated, but certainly the minority would have struck out those claims as unsustainable and objectionable in principle whatever their detailed facts. I have said before that, personally, I rather incline to that view myself.

I accept, too, that that decision and two other particular decisions of the Grand Chamber in Strasbourg, those in Al-Skeini and Al-Jeddah, in each of which the European Court reached a diametrically opposite conclusion from that earlier reached by us in the Appeal Committee of this House—I should perhaps declare that I was party to each of those—have all tended rather to undermine our military capability and to lead to our Armed Forces becoming hypercautious and risk-averse. The particular consequence of the Al-Jeddah decision in Strasbourg is that they have become unable to detain suspect foreign fighters whom we capture, however dangerous we judge them to be if left at large.

Those are the problems, and there is, alas, no single solution available to solve all of them. As for claims by foreign combatants and civilians, both personal injury claims and death claims, as well as—there are very many of these, too—claims for wrongful detention, the best solution now seems to me to be that in any future conflicts such as those in the past in Iraq and Afghanistan we should exercise our Article 15 power of derogation from the convention, leaving those operations abroad to be judged in accordance with international humanitarian law—that is, the Geneva Conventions—rather than the inappropriately restrictive constraints of the human rights convention which, as others have said, is designed essentially for peacetime conditions. Derogation makes it sound awfully simple. In fact, it is not—but now is not the time to explore all the difficulties.

As for claims against the Crown for death or injury suffered by our own Armed Forces, which is the particular problem confronting the Supreme Court in the Smith case, the solution has to be very different. Derogation simply does not have any application. In so far as such claims are brought in negligence in tort, I think that the only sensible way ahead is for a ministerial order now to be made under Section 2(2) of Crown Proceedings (Armed Forces) Act 1987—in effect reviving, in the case of,

“warlike operations … outside the United Kingdom”,

the effect of Section 10 of the Crown Proceedings Act 1947, which had prevented claims for injury or death on military service, notwithstanding that the 1947 Act generally opened the way to tort actions against the Crown. Section 10 was repealed in 1987 really because personal injury damages by then had risen way beyond the level of benefits payable to those injured or killed in service. Although under the current Armed Forces pension scheme, which was revised in 2011 following the review by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, the benefits now payable are improved, they still fall well short of tort compensation.

The noble Lord, Lord West, has already mentioned the excellent Policy Exchange publication, The Fog of Law—and Tom Tugendhat, just mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Burnett, is one of the three authors of that publication. Later there was an equally powerful publication called Clearing the Fog of Law, which recognises—in my view, rightly—that as a matter of political reality, not to say fairness, it would be necessary as a condition of ending the right to sue for combat injuries, to award instead, in all such cases, without the need to prove fault, compensation representing the difference between the AFPS benefits and what would be awarded by way of tort damages. Obviously, this would result in more and larger payments than at present, but it would avoid all the problems of legal proceedings in the way of stress, delay and expense. Of course, it would also at a stroke eliminate the problem, presented by Smith—namely, that the risk of litigation itself causes a dangerously defensive approach to soldiering.

As to the other aspect of Smith, the possibility of claims under Article 2 of the convention, to reverse this it would be necessary to legislate, unless perhaps, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, tentatively suggested, a differently constituted Supreme Court could now be persuaded to depart from the majority view in Smith, which I believe could be done without any offence to our convention obligations. But if legislation is necessary, for want of any further such decision of the courts, it would have to prevent such claims for death or injury on active service. However, I repeat that I personally believe that such limited legislation would be consistent with our convention obligations and, indeed, even if challenged in Strasbourg, would be so found by the Strasbourg court.

As for the concerns expressed by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, about the ongoing inquiries into historic allegations of criminality on the part of our forces overseas, these are concerns that I share—and I would be entirely happy to engage with him or others in discussing the possibility of introducing some provision on time limitations or some other possible way of addressing those concerns.

Whether all the various problems raised around the House today should be addressed in this Bill or in another, I leave to others. Assuredly, however, they should not be left unaddressed for much longer.