My Lords, it is a great pleasure to listen and to speak, however briefly, on Amendment 14, which is clearly the vehicle for correcting one of the significant flaws of the Bill. I acknowledge that I have no military experience and but limited knowledge of the law in comparison to many noble Lords in this House.
As other Members of the Committee have said, this amendment is necessary as it provides that the presumption against prosecution will not apply to war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide or torture. As others have said in this debate, it would restore our obligations under the Geneva conventions, the UN Convention against Torture and the Rome statute to investigate and prosecute grave breaches of humanitarian law.
I am indebted to the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, on whose material I have drawn to make these few remarks. It says that,
“although rare, abuses by the military do happen”,
and that
“The UK has a long and proud reputation of decisive action against war crimes … We do not protect British troops … by hiding from the truth or acting with impunity.”
On Second Reading I quoted Martin Luther King Jr, who famously said that
“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.
Sally Yates, the US Deputy Attorney-General appointed by President Barack Obama in 2015, added a caveat to this quote, saying that it does not get there on its own. That is why we have international and humanitarian law.
This amendment would correct what is clearly a flaw in this Bill as originally drafted. I cannot possibly rise to the erudition of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, or my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti. But I insist that it must be seen in the Bill that there can be no presumption against war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide or torture in terms of prosecution. For this reason, I fully support this amendment.
I ask the Minister, who is clearly much admired in your Lordships’ House, to outline once more why she feels that such a presumption is appropriate and why it does not send a very bad signal that undermines the trusted nature of our legal system and our international reputation. As has been said by so many Members of the Committee, it has the potential to open our military personnel up to proceedings in the International Criminal Court—which is absolutely not where we wish to be.