“British Troops to be Exempted from Human Rights Law”

[islamirama]

“British Troops to be Exempted from Human Rights Law”

10/2016

Theresa May vows to end ‘vexatious claims’ against service personnel. In the UK about £100 million has been spent since 2004 dealing with thousands of cases lodged against soldiers who served in Iraq. Many were launched under ECHR laws on rights to life and liberty.Apparently the Prime Minister will announce today that under proposals she has put forward, Britain plans to opt out of international human rights law when it goes to war. British troops will be free to take “difficult decisions” on the battlefield without fear of legal action when they come home. This move follows an outcry over investigations into thousands of claims against soldiers by a government body examining alleged human rights abuses in Iraq. Mrs May said that the plan would

put an end to the industry of vexatious claims that has pursued those who served in previous conflicts.


​

Britain will put in place temporary derogations against parts of the Convention before planned military actions.Since the Convention has been extended to cover actions by soldiers outside the jurisdiction of the UK and other signatory states, many senior officers have warned that operations will be undermined by soldiers wary of taking risks.Over the past years Article 2 of the Convention, which imposes upon a state the duty to refrain from unlawful deprivation of life, to investigate suspicious deaths and prevent avoidable deaths, has been extended the reach of human rights to British troops in Iran and Afghanistan, and has been applied to military action, which inevitably has the consequences of death. Some argue that whilst soldiers should adhere to the Geneva Convention, the Human Rights Convention has no place in the fog of war. A report by the former military assistant to the chief of the defence staff Tom Tugendhat indicated in 2013 that the effects of human rights law were already harming the country’s defences.Writing in The Times Letters page, Lord Brown, former Supreme Court Justice, agrees that armed conflict should be governed by international humanitarian law (the Geneva Convention), not by human rights law.

Incidentally, is it not bizarre that our own troops in, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan should be subject to the ECHR when those of our allies such as the United States obviously are not? (Letters, Friday September 30 2016)
​

Lord Brown goes on to say that he would support legislation designed to deal “more appropriately” with complaints and claims arising out of armed conflict, including claims by our own forces against the Ministry of Defence.


https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2016/10/04/british-troops-to-be-exempted-from-human-rights-law/

Reader comments:

They make their laws and then exempt themselves from their own laws. Do as you wish war criminals, your time is limited. Nothing will save you against the laws of Allah and in the court of Allah. Your day of reckoning and eternal damnation is coming!

When sheltering the guilty from justice becomes national policy the regime is doomed.

Whats new? The strong make/change the laws to suit their criminal behavior.

Smart move when your Country is run by War Criminals that
are Puppets for Zionist International Bankers that Profit from all
these Wars. Legalizing War Crimes, I suppose The U.S.A. will
do this Next, Israel already has, but that's cause they do
Genocide.

Uk wants to make sure its forces commit crimes and NOT be held accountable ...As we see in Iraq,Syria,Afghanistan,Libya Innocents murdered and tortured before death ...all they are trying to do is escape justice and bring about Satanic law of Lucifer IsraHELL who gets away killing babies and women on a daily basis and the world turns a blind eye .....just as Lucifer wants....

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​

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​

 

[kritikvernunft]

Theresa May vows to end ‘vexatious claims’ against service personnel. In the UK about £100 million has been spent since 2004 dealing with thousands of cases lodged against soldiers who served in Iraq. Many were launched under ECHR laws on rights to life and liberty.Apparently the Prime Minister will announce today that under proposals she has put forward, Britain plans to opt out of international human rights law when it goes to war. British troops will be free to take “difficult decisions” on the battlefield without fear of legal action when they come home. This move follows an outcry over investigations into thousands of claims against soldiers by a government body examining alleged human rights abuses in Iraq.

Theresa May is a bit naive. If the "vexatious" claim gets handled through the UK courts, the victims and their estates are quite likely to wait for the investigations to naturally come to an end, and peaceably collect damages.

Her Majesty's government expresses regret concerning the unfortunate events that took place and which affected the following person. Her Majesty's Government offers the following monetary compensation to the victim and his estate: ......

If UK courts can no longer express regret and pay out damages, the alternative approach will certainly cost much more than £100 million.

Protecting service personnel involved from reprisals back home, over a period of 10 years, is much more costly. The reason why it currently works so well, is because the Qisas allows for expressing regret and compensating the victims with money, in order to peaceably close the case. Without monetary compensation, the situation will simply revert to the provisions in the Codex Hammurabi: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a bone for a bone.

 

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Heh, So the British government wants to disregard human rights laws its find inconvienent. Given the British governments history of ditching its fabled commitment to human rights when it suits its interests.

Still now in future they wont have to deal with explaining away embarrassing situations like this.

 

[keiv]

 

[kritikvernunft]

Heh, So the British government wants to disregard human rights laws its find inconvienent.

Theresa May has made an insanely dumb remark there. She really has no clue. Expressing regret, paying damages, and punishing service personnel misbehaviour are in fact cost-saving devices. I expect strong political opposition to Theresa's plan. Seriously, not everybody is as dumb as Theresa May is.

Still now in future they wont have to deal with explaining away embarrassing ...

That kind of problems is not going to go away by themselves. The videos will just start floating around on the internet instead, while any attempt at suppressing the information, will be met with retalations of its own.

Theresa May simply fails to understand that the British government has no other choice than to actively manage this kind of ugly incidents. The perception of impunity, injustice, and justifying injustices will simply provoke unmanageable retaliations. At the same time, the Qisas clearly indicates that it is in everybody's best interest to close the case by expressing regret, paying damages, as well as punishing service personnel misbehaviour. They will be punished anyway, probably even in this very life. There is no escaping that.

Censorship is also not an option. Theresa still has to come to grips with the idea that she does not control technology, while the people who do, will happily confront her, if she tries. In the end, even the use of force rests to an important extent on technology, while the control over technology is exclusively in the hands of the ones who truly understand it.

Theresa cannot prevent the information about who exactly has perpetrated what misdeeds, and the details of where this person lives, to start floating around on the internet. If she tries, she will find herself daggers drawn with completely different people, fighting yet another war, this time over censorship. If Theresa wants to change the nature of the internet and its technology for the purpose of suppressing the truth about people's unpunished misdeeds, Theresa will have to find enough people willing to risk their lives and die for what she believes in. I do not believe that she will find enough of these people. I actually think that her bluff will just be called.

One group is perfectly capable of Stalingrad-style combat, and another group is perfectly capable of shutting down every type of technology that Theresa may count on. Hence, Theresa will have to come to the understanding that her government no longer controls the use of force, and that she will inevitably find herself defeated, as well as punished for her arrogance. Therefore, it is better that Theresa does the punishing for the misdeeds by herself, before someone else does.

 

[kritikvernunft]

Concerning Benjamin Netanyahu, I think that there is no other option than to continue the ongoing negotiations with him. At the same time, Netanyahu has already clarified umpteen times that he will only be impressed by new facts on the ground. This is unfortunate, because this forces the Palestinian side to produce them. Netanyahu clearly lacks the insight of Simon Peres.

 

[سيف الله]

Salaam

What a surprise, British solider has had his murder conviction quashed. Hes been given a reduced sentence.

Marine A Must Not Become a Hero. He Forgot the Difference Between Right and Wrong

Those who are given the authority to kill must be subject to the law

Those who are given powerful weapons, and the authority to kill with them, must be subject to the law. Forget that all-too-common Hollywood trope in which the brave combatant is held back by the petty restrictions of armchair lawyers. “Shit, charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500,” remarks Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now. No, soldiers should be grateful for the law because it is precisely the law, and its underlying morality, that distinguishes soldiers from murderers. The law is the soldier’s friend.

That is why it’s not just lefty civilians who are morally squeamish about a sergeant of the Royal Marines shooting dead an injured and unarmed Taliban prisoner in Helmand province in Afghanistan. The military are too. Marine A – or Alexander Blackman as we now know him to be – received a dishonorable discharge and a murder conviction – now reduced to manslaughter – after film footage was discovered of him shooting the prone Taliban fighter with the words “shuffle off this mortal coil, you ----”. The Daily Mail led the campaign to have his sentence reduced. And those who would normally insist upon the importance of personal responsibility spoke instead of the mitigating circumstances of combat stress disorder. But whatever the stresses under which he operated, he shot an unarmed man and he should not become the poster boy for military honour.

Compare the Blackman case with that of Sergeant Elor Azaria in Hebron last year. Like Blackman, Azaria shot dead a wounded semi-conscious enemy combatant who posed no threat. Both incidents would not have come to light had a bystander not filmed the event. And it was the senior military leadership, like IDF chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot, who condemned Azaria’s actions the most clearly with rightwing politicians and press leading the charge to declare Azaria some sort of national hero abandoned by his senior leadership. Within days of the Azaria shooting, Eizenkot wrote to his troops: “We shall not hesitate to exercise the law with soldiers and commanders who deviate from the operational and ethical criteria according to which we operate.” That seems entirely measured and sensible. Yet for talking such a stance Eizenkot was widely condemned as a traitor.

The mood in Britain has not been so very different, with the author Fredrick Forsythe, who also campaigned for Blackman’s release, accusing the army’s top brass of betraying him, and now issuing dark threats that those who were responsible for Blackman being in prison are the next to be targeted. Listening to Forsythe, it is the lawyers who should be locked up and a disgraced killer who should be garlanded with gratitude.

No wonder it was so hard for someone like the human rights lawyer Phil Shiner to get a fair hearing in the court of public opinion. Shiner clearly cut corners in seeking to bring those who broke the law to justice. He exposed the torture and death of hotel receptionist Baha Mousa at the hands of British soldiers in 2003, and, yes, he lost his way in the desire to expose other such abuses. But do we really think they didn’t happen in other dark corners or distant fields where there were no cameras to record the event? But the glee with which many greeted Shiner’s fall – this February he was struck off as a solicitor over misconduct – reveals the extent to which we have so little time for those who would fight to bring to light the injustices perpetrated by our own soldiers. No one is interested in hearing this sort of stuff any more.

I used to teach at the UK’s Defence Academy in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire. The course was leadership ethics for newly promoted majors about to take up their first command responsibility in hell-holes like Helmand. It was an intimidating gig, with a few hundred soldiers staring down at me, all in uniform. And we all knew that what we were discussing might mean the difference between life and death, to shoot or not to shoot, in some corner of a foreign field. This ethics wasn’t something distant, academic or abstract. To them and to me it felt terrifyingly important. And we do the vast majority of these soldiers an injustice if we refuse to distinguish between those who break the law and those who do not. Everyone in Helmand was stressed. Not everyone shot their prisoners.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php...forgot-the-difference-between-right-and-wrong

 

[سيف الله]

Salaam

And another update

Home Office Propaganda Unit admits actions of armed forces are linked to “radicalisation”

A recent court judgement based on an argument from the government’s domestic propaganda unit, research information and communications unit (RICU), has resulted in the censoring of a video clip of British marine Alexander Blackman executing a wounded Taliban fighter.

Though several media companies argued that the clip should be aired as it was in the public interest to do so, the judge repeated the Home Office’s RICU head Paul Wilson’s words when he said: “It [the video] would provide terrorists with material they could use to underpin their ‘justification’ for undertaking terrorist attacks against the western powers and to underpin their extremist narrative at a tactical and strategic level.”

“They would use it to argue that western powers are corrupt, do not adhere to their own rules such as the military rules of engagement and the Geneva Conventions and claim that this was the way the armed forces of the western powers treat insurgents on the battlefield.”

There are four important issues that emerge from the judgement in this case which need to be brought to the fore.

Actions of British armed forces can be linked to political violence

The British government, in its counter extremism strategy in 2015, focusses on ideology as the key driver of “radicalisation”.

This approach, which led to a strategy that targets ideas and beliefs, has since bolstered disastrous state interventions such as PREVENT, widely discredited through its lack of scientific basis linking ideology to “terrorism”.

Up until now the government has refused to acknowledge the link between political grievances such as anger and disillusionment with British foreign policy, and political violence. In fact the government’s basis for its radicalisation theory, the ERG 22+ fails to acknowledge political factors at all.

However in this case, the judge, with the support of RICU itself, has admitted there is a link between the behaviour of British armed forces in Afghanistan, and political violence. In other words, the actions of British armed forces can be responsible for what the state terms “radicalisation”.

It must be noted that when the government advocates PREVENT, it disregards the actions of its armed forces abroad as a motivator for political violence, and yet as soon as their narrative stands to be damaged, the state provides the same links between armed forces atrocities and political violence that opponents of PREVENT and counter terrorism laws have always argued.

This is an important point that needs to be highlighted, amplified, and further acknowledged by those in power: that violence abroad is linked to violence at home.

RICU provided integral contribution to the court judgement

It is also worth noting that in this case the opinions of a government department formed an integral basis for the final judgement.

The government’s RICU has been at the forefront of a Cold War-style propaganda programme directed at Muslims. This programme has centred on funding organisations supposedly representing Muslims so they can spread information that is supportive of its counter-terrorism programmes. These counter-terrorism programmes themselves are detrimental to the cohesiveness of Muslim and broader society.

RICU has been at the forefront of this “soft” but deeply structural form of oppression against its own citizens.

It is disturbing then, that the propaganda arm of the government is wielding such a strong influence in this particular case – to such an extent that the judge repeats almost verbatim the highly politicised words of the state propaganda chief Paul Wilson.
Double standards in the courtroom and outside

Blackman has subsequently had his murder conviction overturned and reduced to manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility due to psychological illness. He will now serve only 7 years as opposed to his previous life sentence.

However what the public discourse around Blackman’s case lacked – in contrast with Muslim’s convicted of similar crimes – was the attempt to tarnish entire communities, investigate “radicalisation” at places of worship, or assess if his actions were influenced by extremist beliefs.

Neither did we see the terms “terrorist” loosely brandished, nor did we see the judge link his actions to a belief in white supremacy.

It is only late last year that a high court judge deemed the actions of a clearly mentally disturbed Muslim, Muhyiddin Mire, to have been “carried out to advance a religious or ideological cause, namely Islamic extremism”. Despite the similarities between the two cases, there is a clear disparity in how each of them was dealt with in the public eye.

It’s not only about censorship; it’s about justice

Several media outlets said the video should have been aired because it was in the public interest to do so.

On the other hand, some might argue that censoring the video is in fact a more powerful indictment of the act than releasing it. Indeed some acts of violence are too deplorable to show, and in silencing, sometimes the suffering of victims becomes more potent.

It is crucial then that the discussion around this issue not become about whether or not the video be censored – though this too does have its merits in debate – but about how we react to the inhumanity that nobody can deny is clearly evident within it.

The moral decay present in Blackman’s company was recently attested to in court by former senior officer Oliver Lee, who described Blackman’s company as “completely out of control”.

Sketching scenes that could have been taken from ‘Apocalypse Now’, Lee said another senior officer had described the company as “psychologically defeated, bereft of ideas, unpredictable and dangerous”.

Lee accused a second company also operating in Helmand, Afghanistan of the same, and said both companies dehumanised the local people and had “scant regard” for the rules of engagement.

The campaign which lead to his charge being reduced, seemed to focus on the “stress” experienced by soldiers. However as columnist Giles Fraser, who taught leadership and ethics to newly promoted majors, said: “Everyone in Helmand was stressed. Not everyone shot their prisoners.”

Tabloids that are heralding Marine A, Blackman, as a hero and victim of injustice will only serve to perpetuate the very narrative the head of RICU feared the release of the video would cause.

In many ways, the release of the footage is not so much about the content, horrific as it is, but on how much we as a society value the principles of equal justice.

https://cage.ngo/article/home-office-propaganda-unit-admits-actions-of-armed-forces-are-linked-to-radicalisation/

 

[praisetoallah]

“British Troops to be Exempted from Human Rights Law”

10/2016

Theresa May vows to end ‘vexatious claims’ against service personnel. In the UK about £100 million has been spent since 2004 dealing with thousands of cases lodged against soldiers who served in Iraq. Many were launched under ECHR laws on rights to life and liberty.Apparently the Prime Minister will announce today that under proposals she has put forward, Britain plans to opt out of international human rights law when it goes to war. British troops will be free to take “difficult decisions” on the battlefield without fear of legal action when they come home. This move follows an outcry over investigations into thousands of claims against soldiers by a government body examining alleged human rights abuses in Iraq. Mrs May said that the plan would

put an end to the industry of vexatious claims that has pursued those who served in previous conflicts.


​

Britain will put in place temporary derogations against parts of the Convention before planned military actions.Since the Convention has been extended to cover actions by soldiers outside the jurisdiction of the UK and other signatory states, many senior officers have warned that operations will be undermined by soldiers wary of taking risks.Over the past years Article 2 of the Convention, which imposes upon a state the duty to refrain from unlawful deprivation of life, to investigate suspicious deaths and prevent avoidable deaths, has been extended the reach of human rights to British troops in Iran and Afghanistan, and has been applied to military action, which inevitably has the consequences of death. Some argue that whilst soldiers should adhere to the Geneva Convention, the Human Rights Convention has no place in the fog of war. A report by the former military assistant to the chief of the defence staff Tom Tugendhat indicated in 2013 that the effects of human rights law were already harming the country’s defences.Writing in The Times Letters page, Lord Brown, former Supreme Court Justice, agrees that armed conflict should be governed by international humanitarian law (the Geneva Convention), not by human rights law.

Incidentally, is it not bizarre that our own troops in, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan should be subject to the ECHR when those of our allies such as the United States obviously are not? (Letters, Friday September 30 2016)
​

Lord Brown goes on to say that he would support legislation designed to deal “more appropriately” with complaints and claims arising out of armed conflict, including claims by our own forces against the Ministry of Defence.


https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2016/10/04/british-troops-to-be-exempted-from-human-rights-law/

Reader comments:

They make their laws and then exempt themselves from their own laws. Do as you wish war criminals, your time is limited. Nothing will save you against the laws of Allah and in the court of Allah. Your day of reckoning and eternal damnation is coming!

When sheltering the guilty from justice becomes national policy the regime is doomed.

Whats new? The strong make/change the laws to suit their criminal behavior.

Smart move when your Country is run by War Criminals that
are Puppets for Zionist International Bankers that Profit from all
these Wars. Legalizing War Crimes, I suppose The U.S.A. will
do this Next, Israel already has, but that's cause they do
Genocide.

Uk wants to make sure its forces commit crimes and NOT be held accountable ...As we see in Iraq,Syria,Afghanistan,Libya Innocents murdered and tortured before death ...all they are trying to do is escape justice and bring about Satanic law of Lucifer IsraHELL who gets away killing babies and women on a daily basis and the world turns a blind eye .....just as Lucifer wants....

​

​

​

​

Anyone who harms women or children or even non believers should be punished by law . It is only Allahs right to decide

 

[Sho Islam]

“British Troops to be Exempted from Human Rights Law”

Sorry I thought they were already exempt...

 

[Delphi]

Rotherham.

The famous "M" brand just so you KNOW you are a slave girl taken in a Razzia raid. And yah, that really happened, to some poor girl.

hm.. well, I'm a celtic berserker. Lulz. Enjoy.