Soldiers protect us. We must protect them
General Sir Peter Wall asks, if our service people cannot trust the chain of command and the government that is putting them in danger, why should they risk their lives?
As the British Armed Forces contemplate deploying to Ukraine, their forebears from the Northern Ireland campaign thirty years ago continue their battle in the courts. Activist lawyers appear to be gaming the judicial system in Northern Ireland for profit, whilst the terrorist factions that committed 90 per cent of all killings during the Troubles have immunity provided by the Good Friday Agreement.
The 1992 Clonoe shooting incident is an example of this activity. It involved a Special Air Service patrol despatched to arrest a heavily-armed Provisional IRA active service unit that had just machine-gunned Coalisland police station. Applying Article 2 of the Human Rights Act, retrospectively and without any new evidence, the coroner overturned a previous verdict and found that soldiers acted unlawfully, which now leaves them open to prosecution.
This absurd situation was partially corrected by the last government under the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act of 2023, which shut down all historic inquests from 1 May 2024. That Act has since been repealed by the Starmer Government, who now plan to put soldiers in harm’s way in Ukraine.
Veterans of operations in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are increasingly concerned that they could be liable to retrospective legal challenge over split-second decisions taken years ago.
Today’s soldiers are watching this closely and drawing the right conclusion: the human rights legislation that might be applied, in retrospect, to any operational actions they undertake on behalf of the State is incompatible with effective military operations. It makes one wonder why anyone would deploy on operations at all, knowing that if they survive the threat of shot and shell, they will be vulnerable for the rest of their lives.
Fast forward to Mr Starmer and Mr Macron building their “coalition of the willing”. You would think that British soldiers and their French counterparts would operate under the same legal protection; but you would be wrong. The French military is protected by a derogation from ECHR legislation, whilst the British military is not. The Army is conditioned to the voracity of the human rights industry from the trumped-up and fraudulent cases British lawyers brought against British soldiers who had served in Iraq.
If soldiers cannot trust the chain of command and the government that is putting them in danger, why should they be expected to risk their lives?
No such retrospective consideration is given to the foreign policy or military strategy decisions to deploy military force, or the ministerial responsibility for signing off rules of engagement, or the advice of government lawyers who draft them. The most junior soldiers in the chain of command, and those closest to danger, are carrying the can. We imbue our soldiers with the Army’s values of courage, discipline, respect for others, integrity, loyalty and selfless commitment, and owe them no less in return. This legal treatment flies in the face of these values and breaches the essential trust between the Nation and its soldiery.
We urgently need to restore the primacy of the Law of Armed Conflict as a legal basis for UK military operations and establish statutory protection for soldiers from legal prosecution. And we must provide statutory legal protection for veterans whose lives are being ruined by the retrospective application of laws that weren’t even dreamt of when they were putting their lives at risk to protect our society from Irish Republican terrorism.
Those former soldiers have been betrayed by the undermining of the contract between the soldier and State through human rights activism. This is grossly unfair and the Government should act now to restore that trust.
Reprinted with kind permission of General Sir Peter Wall. This article appeared in the Sunday Telegraph (5/4/25)
A much respected former commander who certainly has my respect for standing up for the servicemen and women who put themselves into harms way to protect our nation.