A UK conflict tribunal would end the current legal mess

Headlines telling of terrorists receiving large compensation handouts should not surprise us, nor government legal defence bills totalling £150m, with accusations of service personnel wrongdoings related to Bloody Sunday or Basra. We will continue to hear our politicians blaming the individuals, lawyers, legal aid, human rights, and even European laws, but never themselves.

It is indicative of the state’s inadequate response to conflict justice that last week saw the state criminal case against an alleged Omagh bomber collapse, leaving the victims’ civil action victory against the same individual as their only provider of justice. Perhaps a way ahead is a dedicated UK conflict tribunal to provide a palatable, non-jingoistic, British justice solution. Politicians caused this deteriorating state of affairs and failed to address the underlying cause. From Ireland to Libya, no recent UK conflicts have had any substantive or cohesive justice mechanism to cement peace. Successive governments forced our security forces into Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan, with derisory post-conflict justice plans.

The Belfast agreement, since it was signed in 1998, still has no overarching justice concept to provide accountability nor a reconciliation framework to ensure the peace. The allies left Iraq without creating a similar mechanism. Current and future politicos will always find it difficult to construct a lasting peace when a short-term peace can be celebrated more readily.

This resulting political malady of post-conflict justice has grown up since the Second World War on the premise that, as the Germans did not kick up a fuss, so neither would the Irish or the Iraqis. But good and evil in most modern conflicts could never be as stark as in the Nazi death camps. After the trauma of the great wars, the political will was to provide the next generation with international solutions, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. But such grand structures were never made to address an evolving justice environment of personal complaints, nor the protection of individual state interests.