Fifteen years after Parliament granted posthumous pardons to the 306 British soldiers executed following courts-martial during the Great War, another campaign is gathering pace.  This time the call is for Parliament to protect military veterans from prosecution years after the event.

The Services are unique in their ability to try service personnel for offences against the law of the land wherever in the world they were committed.  In the case of purely military offences, they alone have jurisdiction.  In the case of civil offences, they normally share jurisdiction with the British criminal courts or, in the case of offences committed abroad, the courts of the receiving state.

The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991.  A decade earlier the British Army of the Rhine was part of this country’s contribution to NATO’s defence of Western Europe.