An overview of the Service Justice System and the Armed Forces Act 2006

All Service personnel are subject to UK criminal law - this means that when they are serving in UK they have the same status as any other UK citizen in terms of how they are treated if they commit an offence under civilian law.

However, the armed forces are expeditionary in nature and are routinely deployed overseas. In many cases, such deployments are to areas which are unstable, often hostile and sometimes where law and order is applied very differently to the UK system.