British soldiers: hounded by lawyers
“The vindictive persecution of British soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan continues apace,” said Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. Since 2010, the Government-run Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) has been examining 1,668 cases of alleged human rights abuses by British servicemen, at a cost of at least £57m. “Heavy-handed dawn raids have been mounted, and soldiers arrested on dubious evidence, based on cases cobbled together by left-wing law firms scouring conflict zones in search of lucrative compensation claims.” At the same time, 600 allegations against British forces in Afghanistan are being pored over by another inquiry, Operation Northmoor. A criminal investigation has been launched into an “absurd complaint” from a Taliban bomb-maker that he was “illegally detained”, and bitten by a dog.
In recent months these inquiries have come under massive political pressure, said Michael Hugh Walker in The Independent. Theresa May declared last week that she would not allow an “industry of vexatious allegations” against UK troops. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has called them a “witch-hunt”. Obviously, we should be proud of our Armed Forces, and the sacrifices they make – but as a civilised nation, we have to hold them to account when things go wrong. And there is ample evidence that crimes have been committed. The IHAT process is robust: an initial 3,367 cases were whittled down to less than half that in the early stages, and only a handful will ever end up in court. To date, the Government has settled 326 IHAT cases and paid £20m in compensation, said BBC News online – suggesting not all the claims were spurious. Only last week a judge investigating civilian deaths in Iraq condemned four UK soldiers who forced a 15-year-old boy into a canal in Basra in 2003, where he drowned.
“Of course, accusations of war crimes have to be taken very seriously,” said The Daily Telegraph – but this process has been horribly mishandled. The majority of IHAT’S cases originated with one law firm, Public Interest Lawyers, which has now closed after allegedly breaching legal aid rules. (The separate Al-sweady Inquiry, into the alleged misconduct of British soldiers in Basra, found that evidence collected by the firm was tainted by “deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hostility”.) Meanwhile, soldiers investigated by IHAT “have been left waiting for judgments while receiving insufficient financial and pastoral support”. This issue may be complex, “but we should not mistake a genuine attempt to get to the truth with the bureaucratic muddle and cynical manipulation of high ideals that has characterised these inquiries”.