A former commanding officer of 22 SAS has accused the government of not valuing the mental health or welfare of veterans as more than 120 special forces veterans are now embroiled in legal investigations.

Speaking on GB News, Col Richard Williams said: “This started with the adjustment to the legal basis for military operations in 1998 just after the Northern Ireland peace process, when the 1998 Human Rights Act became the standard that all activities, including combat, would be held to.

“And the reason, I guess, the commentator in the memo says that the government is ‘hounding’ the soldiers is they’re applying that 1998 Human Rights Act to combat operations retrospectively.

“So all the way back in Northern Ireland, when legal operations conducted, which ended up with combat between armed Irish terrorists and our security forces that led, as the combat often does, to the death of one side or the other, is being viewed through a 1998 human rights lens.

“What does that mean? That means that every single individual in that combat box is being judged to have an inviolate right to life under Article Two. Well, that just makes no sense in a combat situation.

“When a soldier is facing another individual that is armed and is trying to kill him or her, he or her has to take action to deal with that. And thereby that particular inviolate right to life is compromised.

“It’s not a legal nicety, it’s a common sense reality. And so the fact that the government is applying this government and previous governments, that particular standard or law to combat operations is one of the key reasons this has happened.

“In terms of the bill that was produced and put in by the Conservative Party that gave a limitation to this never ending cycle of persecutions was welcomed by the veterans’ community for the obvious reason, it stopped this lawfare, this bonfire of never ending persecution.

“Now it didn’t please everybody, because there were those in Northern Ireland that said that they would like to have some of these old cases reviewed using that particular human rights spotlight.

“And so they appealed to European law and to others in London saying that the Legacy Act didn’t give them the right to do that, and that’s where the ‘illegality’ of this came in.

“This is where the Prime Minister says, I need to take account of the victims’ rights, the victims rights to see what has actually happened. But actually what they’re not doing is producing any new evidence.

“And so what happens is, any of these victims, or those that wish to have a case opened again, and it goes through the issues of coroner court, are now given the opportunity to restart these events.

“The events I’m talking about are cases into operations that happened in the 80s, 70s and so on, with no limitation to it.

“So you’ve got these old soldiers, old SAS, SRR, and other soldiers coming back again into the courts to answer questions that were answered very well at the time and were closed at the time.

“The fact that the report, which was relayed in the paper, only refers to two soldiers that have attempted to take their own life as a result of the strains that are imposed upon them, seems to me to be small, seems to me de minimis.

“The obvious stress that is felt by a soldier that has loyally served his country in difficult circumstances through his professional life, and now has to answer it in his retired life, in ways that question both his quality as a human and what he did, and which was fully investigated at the time as a legal servant of the state: To say it’s depressing is to understate it.

“It’s devastating, and the fact that this government is quite happy to continue to open this, it indicates that they don’t actually value the mental health or the welfare of these veterans in ways that they should do.”