Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill — House of Commons, 2020-11-03
Topic: Defense
Alexander Morrison Carmichael (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I am grateful to you for the opportunity to take part in this debate, Mr Speaker. As the hon. Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) indicated, it bears a remarkable similarity to the one we had on Second Reading, because, it would appear, of how matters were proceeded with in Committee. That is unfortunate, because on Report the House is charged with the more detailed scrutiny of the sort we would normally expect to have and the Bill will be the poorer for its lack. I have listened with care and attention, occasionally trying to intervene, but I am struck by the fact that so many of those who speak in favour of the Bill continue to do so on the basis of seeking somehow to limit civil claims being brought against the Ministry of Defence The hon. Member for Wrexham (Sarah Atherton) spoke about lawfare and made a good point; I speak as a distantly former solicitor and the behaviour she refers to was disgraceful. However, the way to deal with such utterly disgraceful behaviour lies with the regulatory authorities for the legal profession; it is not necessarily for this House to start driving a coach and horses through the important protections we all enjoy, which ultimately benefit most of our armed forces personnel. I do not understand why part 1—an interference with the prosecution and the creation of a presumption against prosecution in criminal cases—will make any difference to the spectacle we saw in relation to lawfare Let me deal briefly with the provisions tabled by the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). His suggestion in new clause 1 is sensible: judicial oversight of some sort for investigatory processes in the context where, as we all know, it is difficult to come by evidence, because it has to come from a theatre of conflict. That sort of protection is sensible, and it is unfortunate that the inadequacy of our proceedings today will not allow his proposal the sensible scrutiny and debate it deserves However, I wish to focus the bulk of my remarks on amendment 1, tabled by the hon. and gallant Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) and the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). For me, the operation of the presumption against prosecution in relation to torture is the most egregious aspect of this Bill. I suspect that if we could sort that—I am pretty certain that it will be sorted when the Bill goes to the other place—then we could probably fairly easily build a consensus around the Bill: the sort of consensus that, by and large, we manage to achieve most of the time in relation to the conduct of and support for our armed services I was struck by what the hon. Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti) said about the various protections that he claims are within the Bill and how that would still make it possible to bring prosecutions in the exceptional circumstances envisaged by its authors. There is some merit in his proposition, but it did occur to me that if these provisions are adequate for torture, they should also be adequate for protections against sexual offences—but sexual offences are carved out in schedule 1 expressly because they should never be countenanced under any circumstances. It is absolutely right that they should be carved out in schedule 1 for those reasons, but it is for those reasons that torture should also benefit from the same sort of exemption that we have seen in respect of sexual offences The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden touched on Belhaj. I will say only this: let us remember that the Belhaj papers were only found, following the fall of Gaddafi, entirely by accident. That is how difficult it can sometimes be to obtain the evidence of torture.