MAJOR CONTENT WARNING FOR THIS THREAD: TORTURE, WAR CRIMES, DESCRIPTIONS OF WAR CRIMES AND TORTURE, RAPE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT

On the 23rd September, the Overseas Operation Bill is due for its second reading in the House of Commons.

This Bill would two major things:

1) It will create a "presumption against prosecution" when UK prosecutors are weighing up the decision to prosecute a member of the UK Armed Forces for war crimes committed overseas.

2) It will create a time window of five years from the time the war crime is alleged to have been committed to bring charges - creating an effective 'statute of limitations' on war crimes.

Let us be blunt - UK Armed Forces personnel have been guilty of committing war crimes in recent memory, and distant memory. The Government is claiming to be stopping soldiers from being the target of "vexatious claims"...

...but it has been *infamously* difficult to actually press charges against soldiers alleged to have committed war crimes.

The International Criminal Court has publicly said that there is hard evidence that UK soldiers committed war crimes in the Iraq War through the torture of Iraqi detainees in partnership with American forces.
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(THIS IS WHERE I'M GOING TO START DESCRIBING WHAT BRITISH AND AMERICAN SOLDIERS DID TO PEOPLE IN IRAQ SO IF YOU'RE NOT ABLE TO HANDLE THAT STOP READING NOW)

British and American forces are alleged to have raped Iraqi detainees as other soldiers took photos, sodomized detainees with chemical lights and broomsticks, and repeatedly raping female detainees.

Some of the women detainees that were raped later became pregnant, which then resulted in many of them being killed by their families in honour killings

Other offences included forcing detainees to strip naked and form human pyramids on top of each other as soldiers took photos

...sleep deprivation, extreme heat and cold usage, humiliation and preying on phobias. Naked detainees were intimidated with the use of German shepherds

and detainees were forced to masturbate in front of US and UK troops, and they smeared human excrement on the bodies of detainees. UK and US soldiers put detainees in dog collars and used a leash to force them to crawl on their hands and knees and brutalising handcuffed prisoners

This was just in *Iraq*. There are war crimes committed by UK Armed Forces personnel in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, and in many parts of the former British Empire.

Prosecutions that were not brought against British soldiers for these war crimes committed in Iraq would be made impossible to bring by the Government's Overseas Operations Bill - effectively granting amnesty for the people who committed these crime against humanity.

To support this Bill would be to support some of the most gravest crimes possible; through this Bill, the Government is legalising torture and rape if it happened more than five years ago and not on British soil.

This Bill must be opposed at all junctures. It is a barbaric piece of legislation that would seek to put British soldiers in a special category of being able to commit some of the most brutal crimes imaginable and get away with it.

Please please please email your MP and demand they vote against this Bill at its second reading on the 23rd September.