[The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Hilary Benn): ... David Crabbe, an Ulster Defence Regiment veteran who sits on the victims and survivors forum, said of immunity:

“The vast majority of veterans living in Northern Ireland did not want or feel as if they needed this protection. It was viewed as a perversion of the law, that went against the ethos of what those who served stood for, and what their role was in preserving law and order.”

And it was not only a false promise; it created a false equivalence between veterans on the one hand and terrorists on the other, and it still technically sits on the statute book today.]

Sir Julian Lewis: May I remind the Secretary of State – I know that he knows it, as he has heard it from me and others many times before – that there is nothing about creating a false equivalence between the two? Everybody is equal before the law. If anything created a false equivalence, it was the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998, which said that no matter how many murders a paramilitary had committed, and no matter how many illegal acts, if any, a soldier had committed, neither of them would ever serve more than two years of a sentence. That equivalence is there. It is not moral equivalence; it is equivalence before the law, and the 2023 Act did not initiate it.

[Hilary Benn: The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right when he describes the provisions of the 1998 legislation, but as he knows, that policy, along with the rest of the Good Friday agreement, was supported by just over 70% of the people of Northern Ireland in the referendum. It was a very bitter pill to swallow for many people in Northern Ireland, but it was a price to be paid for peace.

The point I am making in relation to this remedial order is that the last Government chose to legislate to give immunity to veterans and to terrorists on the same basis. The noble Lord Dodds said of the legacy Bill – which, by the way, he described as “rotten” – that it

“basically elevates terrorists and perpetrators of violence above their victims. That is fundamentally wrong.”

That is why we are bringing forward this remedial order to remove those provisions on immunity that have done so much damage to trust in Northern Ireland. Doing so will provide clarity and certainty ahead of the wider, significant reforms contained in the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill.

The remedial order will also remove the bar on troubles-related civil cases that stripped UK citizens of their right to seek redress. Section 43 of the 2023 Act left some 800 troubles-related civil cases involving the Ministry of Defence untouched.]