Revisiting the Legacy of the Northern Ireland Conflict: Impunity and the Call for Justice

By Brian Dooley

There is a mural in Belfast, Ireland, commemorating the victims of the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971, when 11 unarmed civilians were killed by British soldiers. An international expert panel from Norway, Argentina, Israel, and Ireland has produced a monster piece of research on the British forces during the North of Ireland conflict that details impunity for torture, hundreds of killings, and many more in the context of collusion.

The incoming British Labour government has promised to repeal the terrible Northern Ireland Legacy Act, which has shut down all inquests related to the 1969-1998 conflict. The Act came into force on May 1, 2024, despite opposition from Labour, all political parties in Northern Ireland, most victims’ groups, the Irish government, and human rights experts at the United Nations and the Council of Europe. Whether – and how fast – the new British government will repeal the despised law is unclear.

Meanwhile, in a rare interstate case, the Irish government has taken the British to court at the European Court of Human Rights to challenge the new law. The law effectively offers former British soldiers, police, and paramilitaries a limited form of immunity for conflict-related crimes if they cooperate with a new body. It also bans victims’ families from bringing future legal challenges. The law was passed after a series of recent coroners’ inquests produced embarrassing verdicts for the British authorities. One coroner found that ten people killed in west Belfast in Ballymurphy in 1971 during a British Army operation were “entirely innocent.” Another found that the killing of Kathleen Thompson, who was shot dead in the back garden of her home in Derry in 1971 by a British soldier, was “unjustified.” The introduction of the new law halted inquests into the deaths of another 11 people during the conflict, with many other bereaved families wanting to bring cases to find out the truth about what happened to their loved ones who were killed. There are many cases which have never been properly investigated.

Bitter Legacy

I spent two years, as part of an international panel of experts, investigating state impunity during the conflict. We issued lengthy findings of our investigation as the new law was brought in. Our report: “Bitter Legacy: State Impunity in the Northern Ireland Conflict,” concluded that the British government operated a “widespread, systematic, and systemic” practice of impunity that protected security forces from sanction during the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The panel of international experts included former senior police officers and academic experts and was convened by the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights at the University of Oslo. My colleagues included policing experts Gisle Kvanvig and Kjell Erik Eriksen from Norway; an expert in the laws around torture, Dr. Aoife Duffy, from the University of Essex; Argentinian human rights lawyer Maria José Guembe; and Dr. Ron Dudai from Ben Gurion University. Yasmin Sooka, South African human rights lawyer and former member of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, provided an afterword to the report.

For our investigation, we spoke to bereaved families, former paramilitary prisoners, survivors of torture, and officials of the British government. Backed by teams of researchers, we scoured hundreds of thousands of pages of documentary evidence to identify relevant cases and internal responses by the British government. There was so much recently declassified information that the Innovation Lab Human Rights First created an optical character recognition tool to help search through hundreds of thousands of pages of documentary evidence to identify relevant cases.

We found that the British government blocked proper police investigations into conflict-related killings to protect security force members and agents and found much wider evidence of security force torture and ill-treatment than previously reported. These included cases of waterboarding, electric shock treatment, mock execution, drugging detainees, sexual abuse, degradation, and humiliation. We also found that British claims that only rogue security force personnel were involved in collusion were clearly false. Broadly speaking, we found that if a killing was believed to have been committed by a member of a paramilitary organization, the police made serious efforts to find the perpetrator, and the criminal justice system spent considerable resources trying to secure a conviction. Around 30,000 people spent time in jail for having been convicted of paramilitary crimes.

In contrast, if the perpetrator of a killing appeared to be a British soldier or a British agent in a paramilitary group, there was rarely any attempt at a proper investigation or prosecution.

LONG DESCRIPTION

British security forces killed at least 374 people in the Northern Ireland conflict between 1969 and 1998. We studied these cases and found that several patterns emerged: most victims of state violence were civilians, over seventy percent were undisputedly unarmed at the time of their deaths, and the victims were disproportionately Catholic. During the conflict, only four British soldiers were convicted of killings committed on duty between 1969 and 1998. No prosecutions of state actors were brought between 1969 and 1974, when at least 200 people were killed by security forces. From 1970 to 1973, the RUC (Northern Ireland police) and the British military entered into an agreement that replaced police investigations into military killings with “presentational” inquiries conducted by the Royal Military Police (RMP). This system shielded soldiers from accountability for state violence.

Our research examined 54 persons killed in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Most demonstrated poor execution and/or omission of key investigative steps. While most showed signs of some steps being undertaken – such as the setting up of police cordons, the taking of crime scene photos, the taking of witness statements, the gathering of forensic evidence, and so on – many of these were carried out in a perfunctory manner. We found that many investigations appeared superficial and incomplete, with a clear failure in many instances to perform some of the most obvious and rudimentary steps. The investigations lacked adequate suspect and arrest strategies, and strategies for securing, testing, and probing evidence. Failures included failing to search suspects’ homes, test suspects’ alibis, or seize suspect vehicles for forensic examination. The assessed cases also highlight forensic failures to compare blood on the scene or on the victims with a suspect’s blood type. Both witness and suspect interviews (and associated written statements) were short and failed to seek sufficient detail. Suspect interviews lasted 20-30 minutes and were of poor quality, with information unexplored and unchallenged. These failings resulted in investigations where important lines of inquiry were not followed up, and where large gaps in the findings and conclusions existed.

The investigations examined in detail generally demonstrated gross incompetence and negligence at best, and we found that the State did not conduct fair and effective investigations about state killings. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement did not include an overarching transitional justice mechanism nor concrete measures to address impunity, so since 1998, families have been left with a series of ad hoc options to try to find the truth – civil cases, police ombudsman reviews, coroners’ inquests, and – very rarely – criminal prosecutions. These were far from perfect mechanisms, but in some instances, provided a measure of truth and accountability to some families. Now these avenues have been shut down by the new law. As a non-judicial body, the panel of experts can’t provide families with the justice they deserve, but our findings serve as a reminder of the international standards that families and survivors ought to expect – and what they are being denied by the British government.

Every British government since 1969 has failed bereaved families. The incoming Labour administration can start to do the right thing by immediately meeting its manifesto promise. “The Legacy Act denies justice to the families and victims of the Troubles,” it says. “Labour will repeal and replace it…”. We will be pushing the new British government to act quickly to replace this law with something supported by bereaved families to finally deliver them the accountability they deserve.

● Brian Dooley is Senior Advisor at Washington DC-based Human Rights First, and Honorary Professor of Practice at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of several books about civil rights and U.S. politics. Brian served as a legislative researcher on Capitol Hill, and his work contributed to what ultimately became the 1986 Anti-Apartheid Act.