UK military personnel as individuals are properly subject to UK and international law wherever they serve and there are processes to ensure scrutiny of their individual behaviour and legal compliance but, in the last ten years, legal judgments in the UK and elsewhere against the MoD have raised a number of legal, ethical and practical questions for the Armed Forces and their conduct of operations. The growing number of such challenges is leading to a feeling of disquiet amongst military personnel and informed commentators about the extent and scale of judicial involvement in military matters.There are two aspects of the use of human rights law in military operations that most concern the Committee: The extraterritorial application of the European Convention on Human Rights has allowed claims in the UK courts from foreign nationals. However, the requirement for full and detailed investigations of every death resulting from an armed conflict is putting a significant burden on the MoD and the Armed Forces. Secondly, there has been a failure of the accepted principle of combat immunity, most recently evidenced in the Supreme Court majority judgment in June 2013 allowing families and military personnel to bring negligence cases against the MoD for injury or death. This seems to us to risk the judicialisation of war and to be incompatible with the accepted contract entered into by Service personnel and the nature of soldiering.

While military law is often narrowly understood and studied as the specific and specialist laws, processes and institutions governing service personnel, this accessible book takes a broader approach, examining military justice from a wider consideration of the rights and duties of government and soldiers engaged in military operations.

This book discusses the manner in which Britain’s wars, which took place between 2000 and 2015, have interacted with the relevant principles of international law and English law for the purpose, primarily, of considering legal accountability. During a debate in the House of Lords in 2005 a former Chief of the Defence Staff commented that ‘the Armed Forces are under legal siege.’ The book will discuss the major legal issues which have arisen, ranging from the various votes in Parliament to go to war, the constitutional relationship between ministers and senior commanders, the right under international law to use force, the influence of human rights law, the role of the courts in England (including the coroners’ courts), to the legal regime applying to the conduct of UK military operations. It will assess critically whether the armed forces will now have to accept that operations conducted outside the UK are subject to greater legal scrutiny than previously and whether, if this is the case, it is likely to hinder their future military activities. This book will be of great interest to scholars of international law, the law of armed conflict, military studies and international relations, as well as to those with a professional or other interest in the subject matter.

The European Convention on Human Rights is being applied to military operations of every kind from internal operations in Russia and Turkey, to international armed conflicts in Iraq, Ukraine and elsewhere. This book exposes the challenge that this development presents to the integrity and universality of Convention rights. Can states realistically investigate all instances where life is lost during military operations? Can the Convention offer the same level of protection to soldiers in combat as it does to its citizens at home? How can we reconcile the application of the Convention with other international law applicable to military operations? This book offers detailed analysis of how the Convention applies to military operations of all kinds. It highlights the creeping relativism of the standards applied by the European Court of Human Rights to military operations and offers guidance on how to interpret and apply the Convention to military operations.

What does the rule of law mean, in practical terms, for the way that legislation is prepared, drafted and presented? It is a cornerstone of the UK legal order and requires certain things from the legal system, such as that the law must be intelligible, predictable and accessible. This book examines what those requirements mean for the form that legislation must take. Using the rule of law as the starting point, the author uses deductive reasoning to determine what flows from this in terms of the form of legislation. Each element of the rule of law is analysed to establish principles about the form that legislation ought to take, and the book examines how each principle can be given concrete effect. The originality lies in the nexus between the rule of law and the form of legislation. Much has been written about the nature and content of the rule of law, but relatively little has been devoted to legisprudence, the theory and practice of legislation. This book now draws these two subjects together in a detailed and innovative way.

The Defence Committee says the Government must describe the circumstances in which the UK would intervene militarily in the future. A strategic and well-articulated vision of the UK's position in the world and the level of influence it is able to exert would lead to more rational decisions on whether or not to intervene as well as a better public understanding of the rationale for any such future decision. It would also assist in identifying the strategic objective of such operations, contributing to a more coherent UK foreign, defence and security policy. The Committee supports the Government's adoption of an "adaptable posture" in the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review. The threats to UK national security remain uncertain and unpredictable and it is important flexibility to deal with them is retained. The current main national security threat was from international terrorism, but the Committee calls on the Government to ensure that the next National Security Strategy gives due weight to the likelihood of a return to an increased threat of state versus state conflict. The Government needs to resolve the balance between Parliament's essential role as a strategic inquisitor on military deployments and the use of the Royal Prerogative in conflict decisions. The Government should commit to ensuring that a summary of the legal justification on military action is available to Parliament in advance of any debate. The Government should also set out how it intends to define and assess successful exit strategies and end states.

8 Regulating military operations abroad: the extraterritorial effect of human rights and the potential modalities of parallel application of the right to life under human rights law and international humanitarian law -- 9 Conclusions: grey zones of war and peace in our globally networked information environment -- Index