Conservatives vow to protect UK soldiers accused of human rights abuse

The Conservative party says it will protect British soldiers involved in human rights abuse if it wins the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Defense Secretary, Michael Fallon, has pledged to ‘rip up’ human rights laws to ensure that soldiers are no longer hounded in courts. "Abuse claims lodged by legal firms are costing taxpayers millions of pounds and undermining the vital work of the military", he warned.

Fallon said that in the upcoming Tory manifesto will confirm the party's commitment to diminish the UK’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. He said soldiers will be subject to a new British Bill of Rights and "the next Tory government will limit the reach of human rights cases to the UK so our forces overseas are not subject to persistent human rights claims.

"We don’t care about human rights in the west. Only to the point where it would benefit those in power that’s the only area in which we would respect human rights. Whether it is Tory or Labour or Liberal Democrats, none of these so-called representatives and politicians have any interest in protecting people’s interests in the UK or abroad", Kenneth O’Keefe, Peace Activist & Former US Marine told Press TV.

New figures show that legal claims over rights abuses by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the British taxpayer nearly £90 million ($1.3 billion) over the past one decade. Fallon  said there are cases when allegations were found to be "wholly and entirely without merit or justification".

Other British officials also want a change in the rules arguing that thousands of legal claims against soldier deployed overseas could bombard the country’s judiciary.    

“We can’t go on with a situation where our boys are hamstrung by human rights laws … I made it clear last year that I want to rip up Labour’s Human Rights Act and that it is only the Conservatives who will make real changes to the human rights framework to restore some common sense”, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling said.

Tories’ pre-election pledge has been welcomed by some accused. “To hear the Tories are going to support soldiers is a relief”, said Kevin Williams, who was repeatedly hounded by lawyers over the death of an Iraqi man.

‘Abuse scandals’

The human rights abuse by British soldiers started to emerge just months after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The US-led coalition forces regularly used torture during interrogation of the so-called terror suspects. Such methods applied to Iraqi civilians were often referred by international rights groups as blatant violation to Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention as well as against Britain and the United States' official policies on combat and occupation.

"The only way you could possibly justify being involved in a war is if it’s just, if you’re defending yourself. And the problem is that we in the West are involved in aggressive wars. We are subjecting other people to invasion and occupation and therefore they are the ones that are involved in a just resistance and their human rights aren't respected", O’Keefe said.

The most shocking abuse incidents occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison. Graphic pictures of some of those abuse incidents were made public by British and American media with some allegedly committed by private contractors on the orders of intelligence agencies.

In 2014, a German human rights organization and a British firm presented a 250-page dossier on war crimes allegedly committed by UK forces in Iraq to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The report is the most detailed containing beatings, electrocutions, mock executions and sexual assault against Iraqi civilians. The dossier contains over 1,000 incidences of torture and 200 cases of unlawful killing.

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