R v Page [1954] 1 QB 170
Courts-Martial Appeal Court — murder abroad and the jurisdiction of a court-martial. The appeal was dismissed on 26 October 1953, with reasons given on 10 November 1953.
Facts
Harry Richard Page, an acting corporal in the Royal Corps of Signals, was convicted by a general court-martial at Fayid in the Suez Canal Zone of murdering an Egyptian national in an Egyptian village. His death sentence was commuted to imprisonment by the confirming officer.
There was ample evidence supporting the conviction. The appeal concerned a legal objection: Page argued that the victim was outside the Queen’s peace and that the court-martial therefore lacked jurisdiction to convict him of murder.
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The statutory framework
Section 9 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 permitted a British subject’s murder committed on land outside the United Kingdom to be dealt with in England, whether or not the victim was a British subject.
Section 41 of the Army Act 1881 provided for the trial by court-martial of civil offences committed by persons subject to military law. Its provisions also regulated when serious offences should be tried by an ordinary civil court instead, to avoid conflicts between civil and military jurisdiction.
Issue
Page accepted that the legislation would have permitted his trial in England regardless of the victim’s nationality. He argued, however, that the word murder in section 41 referred only to murder as defined at common law, excluding the wider reach of the statutory provisions governing killings abroad.
The central question was therefore whether a court-martial could apply the law reflected in section 9 when trying a British soldier for killing a foreign national abroad.
Decision
The Courts-Martial Appeal Court dismissed the appeal. Lord Goddard CJ gave the court’s reasons. The court held that the statutory provisions enabled a British subject to be tried for murder irrespective of the victim’s nationality or the place of the killing; where the accused was subject to military law, this could be through a court-martial abroad.
Reasoning
The court rejected the attempt to give murder in section 41 a specially restricted meaning. Section 9 expressly addressed killings abroad of people who were not British subjects. Section 41 permitted a court-martial to try a person subject to military law for conduct which would be an offence against English law, wherever committed, subject to the statutory provisions directing particular cases to civil courts.
The judgment reviewed the earlier statutes and authorities concerning homicide abroad. The traditional territorial starting point of English criminal law had long been qualified by statutory exceptions.
The court did not simply endorse the proposition in the Manual of Military Law that the Army carried the Queen’s peace with it wherever it went. It questioned that proposition as applied to foreign nationals outside British territories, at least without effective military occupation. The conviction was upheld because the legislation supplied the necessary jurisdiction.
Legal principle
The victim’s foreign nationality and the overseas location did not prevent Page’s conviction by court-martial. The decision turned on the statutory extension of jurisdiction and the construction of section 41, including its safeguards concerning the proper forum for trial.
Original report: R v Page [1954] 1 QB 170.
