Armed Forces: Legal Challenge

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Faulks, who described himself as “a mere lawyer”. I know him to be more than a mere lawyer; he is an extremely good one, and therefore he must be well aware that, with this debate, he is stepping into a serious legal minefield.

The report by Tugendhat and Croft, to which reference has already been made, has made it quite clear that they do not consider that the military should be in any way above the law. It does present us, however, with enormous problems. I am not a lawyer, but I would like to divide the two activities of the military into two separate categories. One I would describe as the heat of battle and the other is cold blood.

I will deal with cold blood first. I do not think there is any excuse for an armed serviceman to murder a helpless prisoner. I do not think that the brutal treatment of detainees who are completely helpless victims in the hands of those who are supposed to be looking after them can be defended in any way. I remain to be convinced that any serious intelligence got through torturing detainees has actually saved British lives. On top of that, we leave the moral high ground when we descend into this sort of behaviour, and, inevitably, it gets out. What is almost beyond doubt is that when this stuff does get out, the effect it has justifies the actions of terrorists to carry out even more atrocious acts which put British lives at risk. So, in the category of cold blood, I do not think that anything other than the ruthless application of the law should be applied.

The heat of battle, though, is very much more difficult. The problem is that the law deals in facts; it does not deal in context. Let us face it, the military are the only people who are in the business of actually having to kill people. That puts them in a unique position in our society. If a soldier shoots a civilian, and that civilian is subsequently found to be unarmed and going about his lawful business, it sounds as though he has committed an unforgivable act, but if the context is one of ambushes, sniper fire and suicide bombings, the whole context changes that act. We have to accept that the pressures our military have been under in Helmand province, for instance, where they are dealing with a population some of whom are more than happy to kill them while others are not, completely changes the context in which acts like that are carried out.

I remember reading in the paper about the US Marine Corps in Helmand a few years ago. Some US marines were watching a rather distinguished looking Afghan man standing some way away in a field. They had him in their binoculars and they were wondering what on earth he was doing. This went on for some time, but eventually, they gave up, saying, “We won’t bother”. One marine turned around to walk away, whereupon the man picked up a rifle and shot him in the back. If you are dealing with that sort of environment, it is extremely difficult to bring the courtroom into the actions that soldiers take in such circumstances. If you are on live round training in the military, where you walk down a theoretical alley and targets pop out all around, I have to tell noble Lords that it is very difficult not to shoot the nun straight through the head because your reactions have to be very quick, and sometimes people get it wrong.

With the wisdom of hindsight, the military could have avoided practically every disaster that has ever happened, but the problem is that good armies are trained to take the fight to the enemy. The British Army in particular specialises in the friendly approach of winning hearts and minds, but that does not come without risk, and it is certainly very difficult when you are dealing with people such as Afghans.

On a totally separate issue, I turn to the question of civil liability. I have to say that during my military career, comprising a rather undistinguished three years, I never heard a shot fired in anger. However, I was nearly killed twice while training in Thetford in Norfolk. The first time was when my platoon was acting as the enemy at night. I was running ahead, because the platoon was behind the rest of the battalion that we were supposed to be attacking, when I fell into a bomb crater. Very luckily, I turned completely head over heels and landed on my back at the bottom of what was really quite a deep crater. If I had not done so, I might have broken my neck and died. Later on in our training we were training with live rounds. I inspected the Bren gun of the guardsman who had been firing and it was clear. I walked forward. He put the magazine back on to the gun and pulled the trigger. Those who know about Bren guns will know that that means that the thing goes off. The butt of the gun was on the ground and the bullet went straight over my head.

Are we saying that, if I had been killed in either of those circumstances, it would have been right for my family to have sued the Army because of something it had done wrong? Come on, let us live in the serious world. My noble friend Lord Faulks compared training in the Army to the Factories Acts and so on, but I do not believe that life is like that. You have to train in reasonably extreme circumstances in the military, and you run risks when you do that. Regrettably, people die quite regularly when training with the British military. If they all sue because someone did something wrong and someone died, where on earth will we end up? It strikes me that we are moving into very difficult territory if we do that.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, referred to Snatch Land Rovers. We deployed Snatch Land Rovers not because we had much more sophisticated vehicles that we could have used instead, but because we had nothing else at the time. The military has a great habit of being equipped to fight the previous war, never the current one. Eventually Snatch Land Rovers were replaced, but the fact is that we did not have the option to use anything better. This is another thing that is almost inevitably going to happen with the military. On day one of any conflict, it is never going to have the right equipment to fight that particular war.

We have to be very careful that we do not go down the same road as the National Health Service, where everyone now sues if something goes wrong with the result that it costs the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds a year. It would be regrettable if the military suffered the same fate.