I have listened to the views of my constituents, the experiences of former service personnel, and various human rights groups, and I am of the view that this Bill fails in its primary purpose, in that it does not provide greater legal protections to forces personnel who have served on overseas operations. The Bill denies public transparency and accountability for military intervention overseas. There is an assumption within it that all allegations made against the MOD and UK forces are vexatious, and that the MOD and UK forces are always in the right. We know from history that this has not always been the case. Opposition to the use of torture is enshrined in the MOD doctrine, so why are the Government now trying to exclude the use of torture from the triple lock against prosecutions? As the human rights group Liberty has stressed, if this Bill goes through in its current format, it will result in the effective decriminalisation of torture and many other breaches of the Geneva convention.
We also need to look to the future. We know that this Government are no strangers to violating international law, and this Bill in its current form seeks only to diminish our global reputation further.