Last week’s Supreme Court ruling in the Snatch Land Rover / Challenger II cases, which allowed the families of four soldiers who lost their lives while serving in Iraq to sue for damages, has provoked some strong opinions.
Some say that the MoD is in all ways different from other employers and that it should not therefore be held accountable in the courts.
Of course soldiering is not ‘just another job’, but surely it does not follow that we should tolerate the deaths of young British citizens if those deaths are caused by the Government’s failure to provide adequate training or equipment.
Soldiers should be no less entitled than the rest of us to protection against negligence and human rights abuses. To say otherwise would, effectively, give the MoD carte blanche to disregard avoidable risks to life or health. There would be no deliberate harm, of course, but freedom from scrutiny would eventually result in laxity, and laxity causes injury.
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