The Broken Contract Between the State and Those Who Serve

A provactive paper by Dr Robert Parr MBE AKC,* BROKEN CONTRACT: The Legal Abandonment of British Armed Forces Personnel and the Case for Sovereign Military Operations Framework.

*Visiting Research Fellow, Changing Character of War Centre, Pembroke College, University of Oxford

ABSTRACT

British armed forces personnel are governed by a legal framework that no government designed, no Parliament deliberately enacted, and no operational commander can coherently apply. The progressive and unplanned conflation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and International Human Rights Law (IHRL)— accelerated by extraterritorial extension of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) through the Strasbourg Court's post-2001 jurisprudence — has produced structural conditions of legal incoherence in which personnel may simultaneously comply with IHL and violate IHRL, without either framework providing the clarity or protection that operational command requires. Inevitably and foreseeably, this conflation has coincided with the changing nature of modern war, creating a toxic environment in which our armed forces have to navigate legal complexity whilst shouldering an inappropriate burden of legal risk. This paper argues that this incoherence is not primarily a legal problem. It is a political problem: a product of successive governments' failure to construct a coherent sovereign framework for military operations, to use available derogation mechanisms, and to honour the through-life contract between the state and those who serve it. The paper identifies that failure as a mechanism of betrayal — not merely of individual service personnel and veterans, but of national security itself. The paper advances a programme of parallel reconstruction built around two complementary instruments. The first is a sovereign Military Operations Act, providing domestic legal authority for lethal force and detention in both international and non-international armed conflict, both home and overseas, through ministerial authorisation, a triple-gateway prosecutorial filter; the establishment of an Expert Military Panel; and strict time limits on investigation — expressly disapplying the UK Human Rights Act (HRA) in the military operations

context by a statutory primacy clause, with full ECHR withdrawal reserved as the outer option if Strasbourg challenge follows. It is argued that the current unlimited burden of potential liability carried by our soldiers justifies this novel legal provision. The second instrument is the statutory crystallisation of the Armed Forces Covenant into a soldier/state through-life contract, transforming it from aspiration into an enforceable legal instrument. These are the instruments of a dual strategy: mutually supportive and equally essential.

The paper seems to exist in the Oxford Univ. Research Archive. Interestingly, it is referenced in JusticeForVeterans.uk. And we learn that Dr. Parr is a former active-duty Real Marine and Special Forces officer.