Such arbitrary and authoritarian behaviour would be a clear breach of this country’s obligations as a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, but, nothing daunted, Theresa May, no friend of the Convention when she was Home Secretary, added: “And if human rights laws stop us from doing it, we will change those laws so we can do it”. [...]
The policy lasted until December 1975. During that time 1,981 people were interned, of which 1,874 were nationalists and only 107 loyalists, even though loyalist paramilitaries carried out numerous acts of violence against Catholics and Irish nationalists. Indeed, it was not until February 1973 that any loyalists at all were interned. [...]
This ruling was to have truly momentous consequences. When lawyers in the United States Attorney General’s office prepared legal advice to pave the way for the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation programme”, they reached straight for the Ireland v UK case, and it came subsequently to be used as justification for the Bush administration’s infamous “torture memos” outlining what interrogation techniques could and could not be used on detainees in Guantanamo and other such centres. [...]
In December 2014 the Irish government announced that it would ask the European Court of Human Rights to revise its judgment in the “Hooded Men” case, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan, stated that on the basis of the new material, the government would contend that the ill-treatment should be recognised as torture. Nine of the survivors, backed by the Irish government, are now seeking to take their case back to the European Court. Given that the original judgement has become the benchmark by which countries calculate the legality under international law of their “enhanced interrogation” techniques, the stakes could not be higher. [...]
As Sir Keir Starmer recently put it: “If we start throwing away our adherence to human rights in response to what has happened in the last three months, we are throwing away the values at the heart of the democracy, everything that we say we believe in”.
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