Call for Action: The UN Must Prevent UK Impunity and Obfuscation of War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

By Maya Garner

The International United Nations Watch call on the United Nations to ensure that the United Kingdom upholds standards of human rights and war crime accountability, after the UK Defence Secretary Penny Mordaunt stated her support for the UK to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) for future “significant military operations.” This call from the Defence Secretary comes combined with her proposal to grant amnesty to UK veterans in order to shield them from investigation and accountability for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. We call on the United Nations to ensure that war crimes committed by any country in Iraq and Afghanistan are fully investigated, and that the UK’s impeding exit from the European Union does not exempt the state from abiding by international standards of human rights.

The possible granting of amnesty to veterans and the impending pulling out of the ECHR is a worrying development and raises concern about the UK’s commitment to human rights in its military operations. The change poses the danger of creating a scenario of war crime impunity among the British forces. “It is high time that we change the system and provide the right legal protections to make sure the decisions our service personnel take in the battlefield will not lead to repeated or unfair investigations down the line,” Mordaunt stated. Refuting not only the prosecutions, but also the investigations, of veterans for war crimes poses a danger to the values of values of human rights and to virtue of transparency with regard to a country’s actions during military interventions.

The European Convention on Human Rights entered into forced in the 1950’s, applying to all Council of Europe member states. Article 2 of the Convention guarantees the right to life, and the ECHR as a whole lays down fundamental human rights. The ECHR gave the opportunity to any individual to take a case to court, if they  believed that their rights had been violated by a state party under the ECHR. The Human Rights Act of 1998 aimed to incorporate the rights stated in the ECHR into British law, making breaches of the ECHR treatable in UK courts without the need to go to Stratsbourg to the European Court of Human Rights. Under this Act, any public body violating the ECHR would be unlawful. The UK to pull out of the ECHR would uproot the foundations of the Human Rights Act of 1998 as well.

The reasoning given by the Defence Secretary is dubious at best and raises questions about the UK’s human rights standards in warfare and military interventions. It is a fundamentally flawed reasoning to assume that adherence to principles of human rights is an obstacle to the wellbeing of the British military. On the contrary, human rights ought to form the basis of all national as well as international interests. As it stands, the ECHR permits derogation in some circumstances if “strictly required,” but excludes at all times derogation from the torture ban and the right to life (except results from lawful acts of war). To attempt to derogate prospectively for future armed conflict is unprecedented, and whether it would be lawful to derogate in conflict taking place far away from the UK is unclear. The UK’s impending pull-out of the ECHR could be interpreted as a premeditation to planning acts of war and military intervention that would potentially be in violation of the ECHR. Such possible premeditation ought to be scrutinized by the international community, and the UN must ensure that the UK obliges with human rights under similar standards to the ECHR in all future military actions. This development is coupled with the UK’s pending exit from the EU. Yet the break with the European Union should not be a break with European standards of human rights. The UN must make clear that the UK opting out of the ECHR rather than oblige by these international standards of conduct does not exempt the country from adhering to the same principles of human rights.

The Defence Minister’s announcement inevitably comes in the light of the UK’s recent arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, in which he stayed for six years — an ordeal that may likely amount to arbitrary detention. Wikileaks gained fame in 2010 after publishing a series of leaked documents about U.S. military actions in Afghanistan in Iraq. Subsequently, former U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning was arrested by the U.S. under violation of the Espionage Act and imprisoned from 2010-2017. She was jailed again earlier in 2019 for her continued refusal to testify against Assange in front of a grand jury. On May 31st, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Niels Melzer stated that, if extradited to the U.S., “Mr. Assange would be exposed to a real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” He appealed to the UK not to extradite Assange to the United States or to any other State failing to provide reliable guarantees against his onward transfer to the United State, and He also reminded the British Government of its obligation to ensure Assange’s unimpeded access to legal counsel, documentation and adequate preparation commensurate with the complexity of the pending proceedings. Furthermore, he stated that “there has been a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation against Mr. Assange, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Sweden and, more recently, Ecuador.”

The UN has to recognize the cumulative actions of its member states in obfuscating war crimes, a pattern that here includes pulling out of human rights conventions, such as the ECHR; granting amnesty to veterans, creating a culture of impunity; and silencing international journalists, such as Assange. As a result, the responsibility now falls on the UN to secure accountability and transparency with regard to its member states’ actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the world, placing scrutiny on the United Kingdom, the country here in question. The UN must conduct its own independent investigation into war crimes committed by UK soldiers, and must ensure accountability–– whether of individuals or of the responsible bodies of governance. Furthermore, it must guarantee the safety of international journalists and ensure that its member states listen to the UN Special Rapporteur on the case of Assange, recognizing the importance of the freedom of such persons in preventing obfuscation of wartime actions.