Professor Kieran McEvoy:

I agree. We were very cognisant of the emotional resonance of veterans in the British national imagination and the way in which British people see themselves and the way in which veterans are respected. That is precisely why we spent about nine months engaging with the British Army and a whole range of other stakeholders in trying to find a workable solution that would have kept elderly veterans and non-state actors out of jail but would still have upheld Article 2-compliant investigations. Victims would still have had a day in court, still leaving open the possibility of prosecutions but reducing jail time to zero. That was in recognition that that is the political reality and that there is a degree of sympathy for veterans, which is understandable, so the idea was to work with that political reality and to try to find a human rights-compliant and lawful way of doing it. That is what we did and we came up with such a solution but it was not enough.