Boris Johnson warned today that troops risked being paralysed on the battlefield by “legal paranoia”.
The Mayor said the threat of court action would rob Britain of its ability to fight wars.
His comments follow last week’s conviction for murder of a Royal Marine who killed a Taliban fighter. The soldier was filmed shooting the prisoner and telling him to “shuffle off this mortal coil”. The sergeant, known only as Marine A, faces a life term.
Mr Johnson accepted that the act was murder, but said: “If every act of war is subject to legal challenge, then we will not only lose our ability to fight a war. We will lose our instinctive understanding of what a war crime really is.” Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Mr Johnson also hit out at Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which asserts the “right to life”, and said officers’ decision-making would be affected if they believed their actions would be challenged in the courts.
Mr Johnson said: “The Americans would not dream of exposing their soldiers to this kind of judicial second-guessing. They whacked bin Laden without a second thought. They execute whole families in drone strikes.
“The French have a derogation that somehow means they don’t have to apply the ECHR to their military in the way that we do.
“The risk for Britain is clearly that it will be harder and harder for the armed forces to conduct operations without legal paranoia, paralysis and expense.”
