Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what steps his Department is taking to prevent vexatious lawsuits being brought against British servicemen.

This Government is committed to putting a stop to ill-founded claims against our service personnel resulting from military operations overseas. We recently announced our presumption to derogate from the relevant Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in future conflicts, whenever the conditions for doing so are met. Derogation will help to protect our military personnel from opportunistic ECHR-based legal claims, which will support them in taking difficult decisions on the battlefield. This will enable us to spend more of our growing defence budget on Service personnel rather than fees for lawyers. We will announce further measures in due course.