Supremely guilty

(Al Amarrah, Iraq)

This week the British Supreme Court ruled that British troops are not protected by human rights laws on the battlefield, concluding a case in which the family of a private who died of heatstroke argued that the government was responsible for protecting their troops in foreign wars.

An army is an organisation which is sponsored by a government to kill civilians in other countries. If you join an army you are declaring that you are prepared to go to another country and kill somebody you have never met before on the whim of a politician you have never met before either.

Armies are on a par with governments and organised religions as organisations that show the utmost disdain for human rights, but they are perhaps the most effective at actually suppressing those rights. The British army has trampled over the rights of millions of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan during the last decade, killing hundreds of thousands of them.

However, while it is difficult to summon any sympathy for a man who takes a gun to another country and kills a family in an unprovoked attack – whether the private who died of heatstroke did this or not is moot because individuals are complicit in the murders of a homogenous group – it is true that the ultimate responsibility for the welfare of the employees of the state lies with the state.

The faceless – and shameless – bureaucrats who send young men to a pointless and unjustifiable war should not be allowed to throw off the responsibility for the deaths of either their own soldiers or of the civilians murdered by their soldiers. They should be brought to justice for any deaths, be they from a bullet or from the heat of the desert.

The judges who fail to recognise this are as complicit in these deaths as the politicians and are guilty of perverting the idea of justice, and here the Supreme Court is supremely guilty.