Contribution
That is absolutely right.
There was a question from the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) earlier about who won. The answer is that, in so far as this was a military conflict, we know who won: it was the British Army, particularly with the help of special forces, but it had to suffer that indignity in consequence. It accepted as the price of peace the indignity and injustice of being exposed to the principle of liability and the threat of prosecution, while the IRA was indemnified. That was a bitter enough pill, but the actual practice of repeat prosecutions on the scale that we have seen—not the threat, but the reality—is unacceptable. That is not what was expected or accepted at the time, but back in those days, people reckoned without the European convention on human rights, the consequences of the Human Rights Act 1998, and the lawfare that the convention has brought into reality in our time, in this century. In particular, article 2 of the ECHR applies retrospectively to the investigations, based on the inadequacy of the investigations under standards that did not apply back in those days. That is the essential injustice of the law as it stands and of this Bill; there is a fundamental violation of the principle of legal certainty. Let me quote Dr Parr again. He says that
“the requirement that individuals be able to foresee the legal consequences of their actions at the time of those actions”
is itself
“a foundational element of the rule of law to which the ECHR is ostensibly committed.”
In passing, let me turn to one other indignity and injustice that, I am afraid, has been consolidated by this Bill. No accountability has ever been forthcoming from the Irish state, elements of which were arguably responsible for enabling, colluding with and covering up the actions of terrorists during the troubles, and none is expected in the future, despite the warm words of the Secretary of State. Thanks to this Bill, though, the Irish Government will play a crucial role in our own justice system. That is wrong.
What is happening is that the Government—and I honour them for doing this—are trying to reconcile common sense and decency, and the obvious appeal for justice on behalf of veterans, with the human rights framework that we have. I am afraid to say that that simply cannot be done, so I will end with a few thoughts about the future and the system that we need. We must start by reverting to the Good Friday/Belfast agreement, and to the principles that Tony Blair oversaw back then. He chose peace over justice, and he was right to do so. That was the right principle. Now, in our time, we need to choose truth over individual justice for people who can never realistically hope to attain individual justice. That is the way to heal a community; evidence from transitional justice programmes around the world, particularly in South Africa, demonstrates that that is the way to achieve healing in a community. The hon. Member for North Northumberland (David Smith) put it very well when he talked about the need for positive peace—national peace and reconciliation. Mrs Jones, the lady we have adverted to throughout this debate, is not going to get justice through the law, but if we genuinely open the archives—including the archives in Dublin—and encourage truthfulness, she could get the truth.
Going forward, we need to stop all future prosecutions of the sort that have persecuted our veterans, and we need a Bill that draws a line under the Northern Irish troubles, as well as the Haddon-Cave inquiry. We need a new process for war crimes under English law, and a new legal basis for military conduct without European law. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis) and the private Member’s Bill he has introduced; I think that Bill goes in the right direction, but we can go even further. It particularly emphasises—this is the core point—that the chain of command is ultimately responsible for the actions of soldiers on the ground, and Ministers are ultimately responsible for the use of force, not the poor bloke who had to take a decision in a split-second, at risk of life.
I suggest that something more is needed even than what the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington suggests. We need to go further—we need to pull out of the ECHR altogether. There are many reasons for leaving it, and my party makes those points repeatedly. It protects terrorists and stops the deportation of illegal immigrants, but the most important reason is that it enables the prosecution of our soldiers. On those grounds, we must leave it.