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A Royal Marines sergeant was found guilty of the murder of an Afghan prisoner in Helmand Province in 2011. One of his colleagues had inadvertently captured the incident on a camera mounted on his helmet, and the footage showed the defendant shooting the Afghan insurgent, who had been injured but was clearly still alive, with a pistol and saying:
“There you are, shuffle off this mortal coil… It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us”, and then moments later, “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere fellas. I just broke the Geneva Convention.”
His co-defendants, who were accused of being ‘party to the killing’ and ‘encouraging and assisting’ the murder, were acquitted and are free to return to military service. The three men were afforded anonymity and the video of the execution was suppressed, in order to both protect the defendants and prevent it being used as propaganda to radicalise.
Lady Justice Hallett became the new Vice President of the Court of Appeal. She is currently Vice President of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court, previously acted as Coroner in the inquest into the deaths of the victims of the 7 July 2005 London bombings, and was the first woman to chair the Bar Council.
In Bracking & Ors v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2013] EWCA Civ 1345 the Court of Appeal upheld a challenge to the Government’s decision to abolish the Independent Living Fund for disabled people. It was held that the evidence upon which the decision was based did not give “an adequate flavour of the responses received indicating that independent living might well be put seriously in peril for a large number of people”, and that the Equality Act 2010 imposes a heavy burden upon public authorities in discharging the public section equality duty.
