My Lords, there is no limitation on serious criminal cases, and that is part of the criminal law. In this area, I think of the war crimes that, until very recently, were still being brought forward relating to the Second World War as a result of investigations into the actions of German soldiers in prison camps and elsewhere. The thought that that type of case would be barred through limitation would have a very unfortunate effect on the victims of the Holocaust, who feel those crimes so strongly, and rightly so.
As a result of the debates we had on Tuesday, and this debate, my view is that the clever and ingenious lawyers in the Ministry of Defence should be thinking about putting the concept of combat immunity into some statutory form, to define the boundaries of it so that commanders who are engaged in warfare know
that if they are in a combat situation they do not have worry about criminal civilian law affecting them personally, and so that the soldiers involved do not subsequently face criminal charges as a result of their conduct in the clash of arms—the warfare itself. But “military operations” as in the amendment can cover such a wide area and I do not think that we should go against the whole thrust of the common law and the whole purpose of the criminal law by an amendment of this sort. There are other ways. What is combat immunity? What are the boundaries? They may be fuzzy at the edges but I am sure they are capable of statutory definition.