Armed Forces Bill

The Bill benchmarks draconian penalties for going absent without leave, which could occur in accordance with conscience due to the orders that the soldier was given. We must remember that orders vary according to the actions that Governments might want to take as a result of their international alliances. The proposed penalty is the maximum that has been benchmarked in our society. Indeed, if we went back to the days of world war one, we would have the ultimate penalty. Subsection 2(b) refers to someone who"““intends to avoid any particular service or kind of service””—" that is the nub of it—because he or she does not agree with the Government of the day. If we go back perhaps to 1930s Germany, a reasonable law could be passed by a reasonable Government; but, years later, we might not have a reasonable Government, and we would still have on the statute book a law that criminalises an awful lot of people. It is argued by some soldiers that they are entering into forms of bonded labour for a period of years. They volunteer before action; surely, they have the right to volunteer after action and not in any way to be subject to life in prison. We have the concept of just war, and importantly, we have the Nuremberg principles of the 1950s, which placed a responsibility on each person engaged in a war to assess for themselves exactly the orders that they receive.