A video shared on Facebook claims that the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial, a document that set out rules for administering military justice, has been amended to allow civilians to be charged under military law.
Riccardo Bosi, a former Australian special forces lieutenant and now leader of the far-right Australia One Party, made the video, which opens with him showing a picture of what looks like the cover of the “Manual for Courts-Martial United States (2023 edition).”
“They can charge under this new courts-martial rule, everybody that needs to be charged…and it also includes civilians,” Bosi said in the video.”Civilians could previously say: ‘Well you can’t do this, this is illegal’… Well now they can.”
The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Courts-martial is the judicial system for adjudicating offenses committed by military personnel.
But the 2023 manual for courts-martial has not been recently amended to include civilians, nor does it expand broadly military justice’s reach. The manual is assembled by the executive branch and sets out how the Uniform Code for Military Justice, a law passed by Congress, is to be applied. Congress, the arm of the U.S. government that makes and amends laws, has not changed the code since 2007.
“The manual is inferior to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is a statute and the statute does not permit (ordinary) civilians to be tried by courts-martial,” said Brenner Fissell, a Villanova University law professor with expertise in military justice. “It cannot contradict the code, it just interprets it and fleshes it out.”
Some civilians are already subject to courts-martial but in very limited circumstances. The Uniform Code of Military Justice specifies in U.S. Code Title 10 the categories of people who are subject to military law.
Crucially, one category is described as “in time of declared war or a contingency operation, persons serving with or accompanying an armed force in the field.” That means civilian contractors working with a branch of service during this specified period can be charged. For example, in 2008, a U.S. military court convicted a Canadian-Iraqi civilian contractor who was working as a translator for U.S. forces in Iraq when he stabbed another contractor.
We rate the claim that the U.S. manual for courts-martial has been recently amended to include civilians False.
