Our military, right or wrong? In 326 cases, on its reasoning, the Ministry of Defence has thrown away £20m of our money on “spurious” claims over supposed abuses in Iraq (Plan for UK military to opt out of convention on human rights, 4 October). The MoD has never paid out so much as a penny unless and until cornered by unanswerable evidence. We should, rather, listen to Nicholas Mercer, a former lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq as a senior legal military adviser, who writes of “an invention and an orchestrated narrative” by the government (Opinion, 3 October).
What a stick to beat us with this would provide to the likes of Vladimir Putin or the Iranian mullahs the next time the UK should so much as hint at taking them to task on their human rights abuses. It is time to comport ourselves as a supposedly mature nation should over these issues.
Attempting to kill the messengers – the lawyers pursuing the claims diligently, as pursue them they must in keeping with their strict professional rules – demeans and diminishes our nation.
Malcolm Fowler
Dennings solicitors and higher court advocates, Tipton, West Midlands
• Article 15(2) of the European convention on human rights makes it very clear that there can be no “opt-out” from the right to life, “except in respect of deaths resulting from lawful acts of war”, nor from the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The claims that have been filed concern war crimes, not lawful acts of war, and cannot be avoided by a declaration of derogation. Moreover, they are not generally about acts perpetrated in the heat of battle and the fog of war, when brave soldiers must make difficult decisions, as is sometimes suggested, but rather about cowardly attacks on unarmed prisoners and detainees.
William Schabas
Professor of international law, Middlesex University
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