The military’s ECHR concerns

Earlier this week, there was a European Court of Human Rights ruling that is worth dwelling on. To summarise: the Court held that the UK’s human rights obligations apply to its acts in Iraq, and that the UK had violated the European Convention on Human Rights in its failure to adequately investigate the killing of five Iraqi civilians by its forces there. The judgment overturns a House of Lords majority ruling four years ago that there was no UK human rights jurisdiction regarding the deaths.

The obligation on soldiers to protect the vulnerable during military operations is not, of course, new. It underlies the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (as well as their predecessors and Additional Protocols of 1977). Thus, soldiers have had a duty to protect civilians for years. Indeed, the UK has been a party to the European Convention on Human Rights since it came into operation in 1953, and the conduct of soldiers in Northern Ireland has been considered by the Court on a number of occasions.

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But this is quite an important ruling, as the British government will be pressured by activists to accept that human rights law applies to its acts anywhere in the world.