Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

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

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, during my time as Secretary of State, I had the privilege to work closely with our Armed Forces. I have the highest regard for those who serve and for their integrity. Sadly, we are all too familiar with stories of our Armed Forces personnel being hounded for years and years. The Bill is to be commended for seeking to address such abuses. It seeks to find a balance between the difficult truths that, sometimes, service personnel have been the subject of prolonged legal jeopardy, while sometimes they have broken the laws of war, as we have heard—acts which must be investigated and, where the evidence is sufficient, reliable, and credible, prosecuted and punished.

We all have a responsibility for taking too long to deal with these issues, but the fact is that the Bill does not resolve the problem of repeated and prolonged investigations because the Government have chosen to frame the issue as a legal problem, when the truth is that it is a problem about the timeliness and quality of investigations. Further, the Minister responsible for the passage of the Bill, Johnny Mercer, knows this to be the case. In a Guardian podcast in 2019, he was challenged about the existence of video evidence of apparent abuse, specifically “torture and beatings of civilians”. His interviewer suggested to him that “something has gone very wrong there surely?” I will read out his reply in full, because it is important: “You are absolutely right, and it is a very fair point, that actually one of the biggest problems with this was the military’s inability to investigate itself properly and the standard of those investigations, and it is that precise point which is being challenged by other lawyers and I totally understand that, and this behaviour has been totally unacceptable and the military has a role to play in this as well, and can’t just blame everybody else. If those investigations were done properly and self-regulation had occurred, we probably wouldn’t be here today.”

It is no answer to this criticism that the Government have now belatedly set up a further inquiry into how these investigations are conducted. Not only is the Bill aimed at the wrong target, it will see Britain reneging on its international legal commitments, none more so than our legal commitments to investigate allegations of torture and international crimes and, where appropriate, prosecute.

The Government rightly have decided to exclude sexual offences from the Bill. In response to the public consultation, the MoD said that

“the use of sexual violence or sexual exploitation during conflict is never acceptable in any circumstances.”

Nor is torture. Torture is not only ineffective but illegal. For these reasons, we need unqualified safeguards on torture. Ministers who deny that the triple lock will weaken our stance on torture dismiss these arguments with a wave of a hand, even though a growing and diverse coalition of military, legal and other experts maintain that it will do exactly that, and explain comprehensively why.

The Bill undermines our obligations under the Geneva conventions and the UN Convention against Torture to investigate and prosecute grave breaches of international humanitarian law. It promotes the dangerous idea—recently attempted, unsuccessfully, during the passage of the UK Internal Market Act—that the UK can simply set aside international obligations in law. Its entry into force will be yet more evidence of what Theresa May today called the abandonment of the UK’s moral leadership on the world stage.

Additionally, what is effectively a de facto statute of limitations on the prosecution of war crimes makes it much more likely that British soldiers will be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, which acts only where countries are unwilling to prosecute their own citizens. Recently, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court warned that if a proposed presumption against prosecution were introduced, it

“would need to consider its potential impact on the ability of the UK authorities to investigate and/or prosecute crimes allegedly committed by members of the British armed forces … against the standards of inactivity and genuineness set out in Article 17”

of the Rome Statute. We should remember that we have a solemn commitment to our Armed Forces, given on ratification, that no member would ever be at risk of appearing in The Hague.

Finally, the provision in the Bill which requires the Government to consider derogating from the European Convention on Human Rights has been described as

“legally meaningless and only has rhetorical value.”

What exactly is the objective? Do the Government think that they can simply state that human rights do not apply? Do they appreciate that they cannot derogate from the prohibition of torture and can do so only in respect of killing if it happens because of lawful acts of war, which then engages the Geneva conventions?

I end with a question for the Minister. For what precisely do the Government want this provision, and how will they use it?