Contribution
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford cannot be in his place today as he is recovering at home after an operation. We hope that he will be back with us by Report. I have signed his amendment and I will speak to it. I have tabled Amendments 54 and 68, and I have also signed Amendment 55 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. To protect their identities, the victims’ names that I will use are not their own.
I am sure noble Lords will recall the disgraceful case of US spy Anne Sacoolas, who in 2019 was driving on the wrong side of the road in Northamptonshire when she hit and killed Harry Dunn, aged 19. The US authorities then managed to spirit her out of the country to evade justice. We then became aware that the US authorities do not respect our policing and justice systems. She was eventually brought to justice, but only because of Harry’s family’s campaign and then public and governmental pressure.
In recent months, following the brave disclosures made by a victim of rape and sexual assault by a US serviceman on UK soil—not on his USAF base—many more shocking cases have emerged. At Second Reading, my noble friend Lord Thomas and I spoke of this case. In 2023, Jacob Wulfson, a US Air Force pilot, sexually attacked a Cambridge resident in his own Cambridge property, so not at the Lakenheath base where he worked. His victim, whom I have talked to, was very clear that she was alleging rape and sexual assault.
Under the terms of the Visiting Forces Act 1952, it is clear that, where an offence by an off-duty American serviceman against a British civilian takes place off an American base, the investigation and any subsequent court case should usually be in the UK Crown Court; the rest of the Bill goes on to talk about exceptions to that. What happened in this case was that the Cambridgeshire police waived jurisdiction—and, as I understand it, not at a senior level. The trial took place via a court martial before a US military judge and a panel at the Lakenheath base. All the UK protections that are offered to victims of alleged rape and serious sexual attacks disappeared at that moment. Worse, because the victim is not American, she was not entitled to the minimal victim support that is available to US citizens in US courts, as compared to the victim’s rights here in the UK. Worse still, since the victim was brave enough to talk to the Guardian newspaper, many more similar cases have been reported. So this is now, we understand, not a rare occurrence.
I can see why our beleaguered police forces would welcome the removal of cases from their very heavy workloads, but these decisions are not being made at the right level and it is not clear at all that the CPS is involved. I was astonished to discover that many of the specific agreements between us and other countries on such justice systems are made as secret and confidential between the UK and the country. We in Parliament, the press or even the victims cannot find out the details.
The Guardian exposed another case in July. Rebecca fled the house of an American airman in Suffolk, going to the police to report that he had raped and violently attacked her. She saw specialist health and police staff. They looked after her. She was given an ISVA—an independent sexual violence adviser—to support her in the legal UK process. Then, the USAF at RAF Lakenheath did exactly the same as in the previous case I described and persuaded Suffolk Police to transfer the case to it because justice would be quicker. Then Emily, the wife of the accused—Tyrion Davis—also came forward to say that she had been raped and sexually assaulted by him on a number of occasions. At the subsequent Lakenheath trial, he was convicted of sexually assaulting both Rebecca and Emily. On discovering that the jury panel at Lakenheath would be composed of Davis’s military peers from a small base, by our jury pool for civil court cases standards, Rebecca said:
“It’s like, if I did something wrong outside of work, having all of my nursing colleagues being on the jury … It doesn’t make sense”.
In another case, Hannes Marschalek boasted to his friends that he had exposed himself from his house in the small town of Littleport, near RAF Lakenheath, to a 16 year-old girl and four young women as they went past. When asked why US Air Force authorities had taken over the case, a spokesperson said that they had
“negotiated jurisdiction over this case with the local police using all available facts at the time”.
The accused was able to negotiate a plea bargain in his case and was convicted on a much lesser charge. He later won an appeal in a US military court this year, which quashed his conviction on technical grounds even though the court papers showed that he had texted two friends to say he had
“definitely just flashed a couple [of] ladies walking from the train, LOL”
and later texted:
“I took all of my clothes off when I walked in. I went to go open a window and I was standing right in front of it when they walked by”.
He also admitted in court that he had done this twice before. The US military court sentenced him to two months. If it had been in a UK court, he would probably have received two years. Then, astonishingly, a US military appeal court dismissed the guilty verdict against him, ruling that prosecutors had made an error by charging him under the wrong offence; I suspect that they realised that it should have been a more serious one.