Armed Forces Bill

Far be it from me to attempt to put words into the Secretary of State’s mouth, but it is difficult enough to reconcile the disciplinary position between the three services in this country without trying to reconcile it with the disciplinary procedures for other forces serving abroad. In any case, in some details, for example, in the Falklands and Iraq, our soldiers often operate by themselves and have to be subject to a British disciplinary code that is based on British law. Surely that is the correct position for British armed forces. The correspondence between the Attorney-General and the Secretary of State’s predecessor, which was discovered during a recent legal action, is extremely revealing. An article in The Observer on 27 February reported that the Attorney-General wanted to replace the Army prosecuting authority with criminal lawyers from outside the Army, an intervention about which, I am pleased to say, the former Secretary of State said that it"““did indeed cause me concern””." Such a move would be a grave mistake. Ministers need to understand that, in many parts of the services, there is a general anxiety about the increasing threat to the disciplinary traditions of the armed forces. Perhaps it was best put by the former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Boyce, when he spoke in a debate in the other place on 14 July. He said:"““The Armed Forces are under legal siege and are being pushed in a direction that will see such an order being deemed as improper or legally unsound. They are being pushed by people not schooled in operations but only in political correctness. They are being pushed to a time when they will fail in an operation because the commanding officer’s authority and his command chain has been compromised with tortuous rules not relevant to fighting and where his instinct to be daring and innovative is being buried under the threat of liabilities and hounded out by those who have no concept of what is required to fight and win.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 14 July 2005; Vol. 673, c. 1236.]" There will undoubtedly be a debate on how true that perception is. However, its existence is debilitating. There is a particular anxiety about the operation of the European convention on human rights and the Human Rights Act 1998 and its impact on service law, of which we had several recent examples. The basic problem is that no set-aside was made for the military. When debating the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), who was then shadow Foreign Secretary, called for us to do as the French had done and exercise a seven-year opt-out. He also called for a watertight opt-out, which would enable Ministers who were confident that a case was vexatious to ensure that a warrant was not executed against a member of Her Majesty’s armed forces. Neither proposal was heeded. Several cases that involve the Human Rights Act or the ICC are causing considerable anxiety, for example, that involving Colonel Mendonca and six other members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment and the Intelligence Corps—the first brought against British personnel under the ICC. We heard today about the case of Trooper Williams. That raises suspicions in some quarters that the prosecuting authority behaved in a way more compatible with political than judicial priorities.