Description
On the 15th of September 2003, in a detention facility in the Iraqi city of Basra, a hotel receptionist named Baha Da’oud Salim Mousa died following 36 hours of abuse and mistreatment meted out by British soldiers. The rippling consequences of this individual human tragedy could not have been foreseen. Mousa’s death and the resulting litigation had wide-reaching effects on Britain and its armed forces. Over the next 20 years, Britain faced hundreds of war crimes allegations emanating from its involvement in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In response, a complex web of accountability mechanisms and legal precedents developed, spanning Courts Martials, judicial review cases, three public inquiries, the establishment (and closure) of a series of new investigative bodies, and two preliminary examinations by the International Criminal Court.
This project uses in-depth archival research to establish a contemporary history of these events, plotting the development of accountability processes alongside the responses of the political sphere and wider public. As the first overarching study of these events, it establishes new links and continuities between events across the period, from the early Courts Martial of 2004 to the passage of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act in 2021. More broadly, it speaks to the reality of military justice as a product of the society which undertakes it, the difficulties encountered when international justice becomes the subject of political debate, and brings into sharp focus the challenges faced when an organisation is forced to reckon with its own alleged misdeeds.
