Military Action Under Lawfare: Conflicting Codes Impede Decisions

18 May 2026 12:48 PM

The UK should return to the Law of Armed Conflict alone, rather than allow Human Rights Law Courts to interfere with conducting military action overseas.

Over recent years, there has been much discussion of the impact of law on military operations, with controversy around the impact on the chain of command from human rights rulings, the growth of so-called ‘lawfare’ and a range of civil legal proceedings, from service personnel suing for injuries sustained through to coroners’ courts. There have also been a series of investigations into alleged war crimes by UK Service personnel in overseas theatres, which have yielded a tiny number of criminal convictions but large numbers in civil payouts. This article is focused exclusively on the changing framework of law which governs the UK armed forces outside the United Kingdom and its dependencies, although there is also much controversy around UK law for forces on operations, especially in Northern Ireland.

In 2014, the House of Commons Defence Committee produced a report on this subject: UK Armed Forces Personnel and the Legal Framework for Future Operations. This pointed out that there are two very different, and sometimes conflicting, legal frameworks for overseas operations. On the one hand, the traditional Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), or International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as it is sometimes called; in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Geneva Protocols of 1977. On the other, more recently, there is Human Rights Law (HRL).

The Committee concluded that changes were needed, both to clarify the situation and to make it workable for our forces. Without making many detailed proposals the then-committee warned that serious potential problems were emerging and recommended that the government needed to study the increasingly complex situation and ‘should take proactive steps to reconfirm the primacy, continued value and distinct nature of IHL.’ Successor committees have not yet revisited the subject at any length.

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