The Troubles Bill Does Not Protect Soldiers, it Reassigns Blame
By Dr. Rois Ni Thuama*
Whatever view one takes on the moral case for the Government’s Troubles Bill, the deeper problem is legal and constitutional. The Bill does not do what it claims to do. It says it reforms governance. It does not. Instead, it relocates accountability down the chain of command, towards those who executed operations, while leaving upstream State decision-making largely untouched.
That matters directly for soldiers and officers who do not control the decisions now being insulated from them.
The Government states that the Bill “reforms the governance and functions” of the new Legacy Commission. That is not a technical claim about process. It is a constitutional claim about how the State directs, controls, and accounts for the use of force. If governance is being reformed, it must address those upstream decisions. Reforming how a commission writes reports is not governance reform.
What governance means in military operations
In military terms, governance sits upstream of the patrol, the arrest, or the engagement. It concerns how operations are conceived and authorised; what intelligence is relied on; how confidence and risk are assessed; what legal framework applies; and who carries accountability for those choices.
Soldiers operate within those parameters. They do not design them.
If a Bill claims to reform governance in relation to deaths caused by State force, it must examine how the State planned and controlled operations, not just how the final moments are reconstructed after the fact.
This is where the Bill fails.
What the Bill actually does
Section 3(2) sets out the Legacy Commission’s functions. In brief, they are to investigate conduct linked to Troubles-related deaths or harm, examine the circumstances of a death, collect personal statements, and produce a historical record.
All of these functions are retrospective. They look back at events. They are incident-centred. They sit downstream of the decision to deploy force.
Retrospective investigation is not wrong in itself. The problem is that the Bill confines the Commission largely to the incident itself. It records what happened, but it is not designed to examine how the State set the conditions for it to happen.
What the Bill cannot examine and why that matters
The Commission’s principal functions, as defined in section 3(2), are incident-centred. They are designed to reconstruct events and produce records, not to make upstream State planning, authorisation, intelligence quality, or command decisions the primary objects of inquiry.
That omission matters because the law governing the use of lethal force does not focus solely on what a soldier did in the final seconds of an operation. It focuses on whether the State planned and controlled operations in a way that minimised the risk to life.
If the failure lies upstream, a mechanism that looks only downstream cannot fix it.
The practical effect: accountability flows to the wrong place
The consequence is predictable. If intelligence was weak, misleading, or later shown to be false, those who generated it, validated it, or authorised reliance on it can escape scrutiny under this scheme. The burden instead falls on soldiers and officers.
That is not reasonable. In practice, officers and soldiers must rely on intelligence passed down the chain of command. They do not have the mandate, time, or systems to interrogate its provenance or confidence. There are sound operational reasons why lawful orders are accepted without challenge.
We have seen in other campaigns what happens when upstream intelligence propositions later prove unreliable. Claims about “45 minutes” and assertions about biological and chemical weapons became decision-shaping propositions and then materially collapsed. The point is not to relitigate Iraq; it is to underline a governance reality. When intelligence fails at source, it is neither lawful nor just to treat the point of execution as the primary site of accountability.
The governance failure sits upstream: where single-source or low-confidence intelligence is presented as robust; where fragments are duplicated across reports and mistaken for corroboration; or where decision-makers are not clearly told what kind of intelligence they are relying on: contested, low confidence, or untested.
If intelligence validation is someone’s responsibility, it must be defensible. That means clear provenance, confidence grading, independent challenge, and a record of what was known, assumed, or merely asserted.
Why this is unjust to soldiers
The Bill risks producing a manifest injustice. It fixes practical responsibility on those who executed what appeared to be a lawful order, while structurally shielding those who shaped the decision environment above them.
This is not hypothetical. Long-standing case law accepts that soldiers may honestly believe their actions are necessary and act under superior orders. Where things go wrong, the deficiency is often found in the State’s planning, intelligence, and control, not with the individual soldier.
Responsibility can be shared; accountability cannot be delegated away.
The “looks broad, works narrow” problem
The Bill’s definitions are broad. But a broad scope is not the same as a functioning accountability architecture.
Even where upstream conduct is nominally within scope, the Commission lacks the powers and functions needed to examine the very decisions that lawful governance requires: planning, authorisation, and control.
The scheme looks comprehensive. It operates narrowly.
Why this cannot become doctrine
On any fair reading, the Bill does not do what it claims. It does not reform governance. It relabels downstream review while leaving upstream decision-making untouched.
There is a further and more serious risk. Once enacted, this model will not remain confined to Northern Ireland. Statutory architectures have a habit of travelling. If the State normalises a system that fixes accountability at the point of execution while insulating upstream decisions, that error will not be local. It will be portable.
Soldiers did not deploy themselves. A system that forgets that truth does not protect them. It quietly abandons them with constitutional consequences that will endure long after this Bill.
* Republished with kind permission from Dr. Rois Ni Thuama, founder of RTConsulting Limited, which helps boards and senior leaders make defensible decisions on cyber and operational risk before the crisis, not in the aftermath.
She is on LinkedIn, or you can visit her Substack to find out more.
Yes correct