AT THE Tory Party conference yesterday, Theresa May and her defence secretary Michael Fallon jointly announced that in any future war British troops would not be bound by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
May claimed the change would ‘put an end to the industry of vexatious claims’, while Fallon said that opting out of ECHR would end the ‘significant distress to soldiers’ and enable the army to ‘do their job.’
That job being to invade other people’s countries and kill their inhabitants or lock them up and teach them to bow the knee before Britain’s might. The ‘distress’ caused to people and their families by illegal wars in the Middle East and the well-documented cases of torture and illegal killings naturally does not concern May or the Tories.
Following a lengthy campaign, May has finally outlined her plans to derogate from the ECHR. Derogation being the term for a partial suppression of laws. Derogating from the ECHR is permitted under the rules of the ECHR in times of war and, significantly, in times of public emergency.
By declaring that henceforth there will be a near permanent derogation from the Convention on Human Rights, May is announcing that the British military will be free to kill, maim and torture anywhere in the world, including in Britain.
Although torture is still regarded as illegal even if derogation has been implemented, the Tories have been active in fixing that by a concerted campaign to intimidate and bankrupt the main civil rights lawyers who have tenaciously represented victims of the brutal imperialist invasion of Iraq.
In August, the company Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) was forced to close when all government legal aid was cut off. Along with Leigh Day, another leading firm of civil rights lawyers, they faced an orchestrated witch-hunt and disciplinary proceedings by the Solicitors Disciplinary Committee that could see them struck off and barred from legal practice.
Attacking the move to confer legal immunity on the military, the director of the civil rights organisation Liberty, Martha Spurrier, said that the majority of claims were not vexatious, pointing out that: ‘The MoD has been forced to settle hundreds of cases of abuse, which speaks to mistreatment on the battlefield that we should be trying to eradicate, not permit.’
Even a former lieutenant colonel, Nichols Mercer, who acted as a senior legal military adviser to the army during the Iraq war, attacked the government for inventing an ‘orchestrated narrative’.
Writing in the Guardian newspaper, he rubbished May and Fallon saying: ‘The idea that the claims are largely spurious is nonsense. The Ministry of Defence has already paid out £20m in compensation to victims of abuse in Iraq. This is for a total of 326 cases, which by anyone’s reckoning is a lot of money and a shocking amount of abuse.
Anyone who has been involved in litigation with the MoD knows that it will pay up only if a case is overwhelming or the ministry wants to cover something up.’ What the MoD and government want to cover up is the naked brutality of British imperialism, a brutality not confined in any way to wars against the people of the Middle East but which they fully intend to use against the working class at home.
It is no accident that the police are demanding similar immunity from prosecution as they pursue a shoot-to-kill policy on the streets of Britain. Nor is it an accident that the last time Britain applied for derogation was during its murderous campaign against the nationalist workers in the north of Ireland during the 1970s.
The working class must heed this warning. As the crisis of capitalism reaches the point of collapse the ruling class are looking to defend their interests and profits with armed might used with no legal constraints against a working class revolutionised by the crisis.
The only way to defeat the civil war plans is for the working class to act decisively by demanding a general strike to kick out the Tories and advance to a workers government and socialism.
