Armed Forces Bill

I just want to make one or two short points. It is interesting that while the noble and gallant Lord is perfectly correct that it is not the practice in the United Kingdom for there to be any statutory limitation on prosecution for crimes other than summary crimes, it is quite commonplace in the civil law countries for there to be limitations. So our allies in France or Germany, for example, would, I suspect, be protected by a limitation of the kind proposed. I am not suggesting that we should adopt that philosophy, which is quite contrary to our practice, as we can see in cases of historical child abuse. I wonder, however, whether the wiser course, rather than going into the area of limitation, which is so difficult and would be seen as an invitation to start doing this for other crimes, would be simply to have a blanket immunity for our servicemen when engaged in military operations, of the kind that I think used to be the case—I stand to be corrected—before the law was changed some years ago by the previous Armed Forces Act. This is certainly an important point to consider, but I favour doing so not by way of limitation but by way of exclusion entirely for acts of that kind while engaged on military operations, while making make it quite clear that we are not dealing with cases of one serviceman on another—let us say of one serviceman assaulting another, stealing from him or things like that.