Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Lord Naseby Excerpts

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

[Lord Naseby (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I am a former—[Inaudible]—RAF pilot who nearly saw service and action at Suez. My son was in the front line in the retaking of Kuwait.

This is an important Bill, not just because it was in the manifesto of the Conservative Party but because its progress will be watched overseas, particularly by the Commonwealth and our fellow members of NATO. It is a sad reflection on modern society that the Bill is needed at all. I reflect on the end of the Second World War, when there was a huge effort to make peace work. The vehicle conceived was the Geneva Convention of 1949 and subsequent additional conventions attached to it. It was a convention that sought to ensure a proper legal framework if war should break out again—the relevant law for armed conflict.

I shall quote the late Sir Desmond de Silva, a former UN-sponsored chief prosecutor for a war crimes tribunal. He said that the European Convention on Human Rights, on which the British Human Rights Act is based, was wholly inappropriate for application in combat and battlefield conditions. The law that should operate in such circumstances is the law of armed conflict, otherwise known as international humanitarian law. This greatly respected man, who is no longer with us, went on to say that

“I am quite satisfied that accountability in war is best dealt with by applying law that is specifically designed for war conditions.”

There we have it.

At the same time, society has been changing. Issues of human rights have been expanding. The European Convention on Human Rights and its territorial applicability grows ever wider. Organisations such as Amnesty International, Freedom from Torture and dozens of others have sprung up—all of them very different from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which we all respect. As those organisations expanded, so did the media. Untrammelled, instant responses with no independent verification were taken to extraordinary lengths by some of our TV companies, such as Channel 4 and its fake films and propaganda in “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields”. There are other examples affecting Syria and Iraq.

The House knows that the broad thrust of the Bill is there to establish new restrictions on bringing procedures against current and past UK Armed Forces on overseas assignments. I, for one, absolutely support the Bill.

Let me give an example of a challenge in another country. As Members of the upper House, noble Lords will be well aware that I have been deeply involved, in detail, with Sri Lanka. That country had a 30-year insurrection from the Tamil Tigers, a proscribed organisation that killed off all the moderate Tamils. That war came to fruition, starting on 1 January 2009 and finishing on 18 May. I made a Freedom of Information Act inquiry because I was told by the UN that there were 40,000 casualties. I asked the Foreign Office about Colonel Gash’s independent dispatches, which took two years to obtain. They made it clear that no war crimes were carried out in Sri Lanka in that war. Therefore, my request is that maybe we also need to use the Freedom of Information Act to ensure that our Foreign Office releases dispatches from our observers who watch war anywhere around the world.