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LAST UPDATE | 14 Jun 2021
SUPREME COURT JUSTICES are considering whether the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is sufficiently independent to carry out investigations into events during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Seven judges based in London are hearing arguments relating to proposed police investigations into the killing of a Catholic woman in 1972 and the treatment of 12 people, who have become known as the ‘Hooded Men’, detained in 1971, at a remote hearing due to end on Wednesday.
Lord Hodge, Lord Lloyd-Jones, Lord Kitchin, Lord Sales, Lord Hamblen, Lord Leggatt and Lord Burrows, have been asked to consider issues relating to the shooting of 24-year-old Jean Smyth in Belfast and the detention of the ’Hooded Men’ following rulings by judges in Northern Ireland.
A barrister representing Jean Smyth’s sister, Margaret McQuillan, and Francis McGuigan, one of the ‘Hooded Men’, told judges that the cases were of the “utmost seriousness”.
Hugh Southey QC said, in a written case outline, that one case concerned the fatal shooting of an “unarmed young mother”, in circumstances “implicating British Army personnel”.
He said the other concerned “state-sanctioned torture and/or inhuman and degrading treatment”.
Southey said two issues arose in both cases, the “applicability of investigatory obligation” imposed by articles of the European Convention on Human Rights and the independence of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
He argued that Smyth’s sister and Francis McGuigan were entitled to “effective, independent investigation” and told judges that the Police Service of Northern Ireland lacked the “requisite independence to investigate”.
In September 2019, the Court of Appeal in Belfast ruled that interrogation techniques used against the ’Hooded Men’ would be torture if deployed today.
In a majority decision, senior judges also held that the group had a legitimate expectation police would further investigate claims that their treatment was sanctioned by the British government.
The 12 surviving members of the hooded men had brought the original case against the Chief Constable, Secretary of State and the Department of Justice.
Five techniques were used against the men while they were held without trial: being hooded, made to stand spread-eagled in a stress position against a wall and beaten if they fell; forced to listen to constant loud static noise; and deprived of sleep, food and water.
Amnesty International, which has supported a campaign by the “hooded men”, wants independent investigations.
Grainne Teggart, Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland campaign manager, said, before the hearing, that the ’Hooded Men’ case would be “hugely significant” to “torture victims across the world” and to the ongoing “unresolved issue of the legacy of the Troubles”.
Lawyers representing the Police Service of Northern Ireland asked the Supreme Court to consider the case, following court hearings in Northern Ireland.
Judges are also hearing arguments from lawyers representing Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis.
A Supreme Court spokeswoman said, in a written explanatory note, judges would consider whether the Legacy Investigations Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland was “sufficiently independent” to investigate Jean Smyth’s death, or other “such deaths”.
The spokeswoman said an investigation was planned by the Police Service’s Legacy Investigations Branch but, before it began, Smyth’s sister had taken legal action and raised issues relating to independence.
She said judges would also consider whether the Police Service of Northern Ireland was “sufficiently independent” to carry out “any necessary investigation” into the treatment of the ‘Hooded Men’.
- With reporting by Michelle Hennessy.
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Shocking appeal by the PSNI
@Alan Bolger: The PSNI brought the war to ordinary decent republicans giving them no option but to fight back. Its time to get to the bottom of this and move on.
@Neil Neart: I presume you mean RUC and not PSNI.
@GrumpyAulFella: well back Eoghan. I asked you a question the other day and you disappeared. As a few of the other posters pointed out, you always disappear when the questions don’t suit your narrative.
@James Beattie: are you addressing that to me or some guy called Eoghan? I presume that you’re responding to the wrong post.
@GrumpyAulFella: it’s for you Eoghan, you obviously think the same when you replied
@GrumpyAulFella: same force just different name aka b specials
@James Beattie: ah ok Mary.
@Mona Murphy: i think there are more than 3 times more Catholics in the PSNI than were members of the RUC. 32% versus less than 10%, so more balanced but still some way off being entirely balanced from a community perspective.
Into the 3rd decade of this and worse happening In Guantanamo Bay. Two Obama administrations and now one Biden administration. some there for 17 years without charge.
The southern government guilt of collusion in allowing rendition flights from Shannon.
@Peter McGlynn: fail to see what relevance the USA and Ireland have to the torture of British citizens by PSNI .
@Garry Brady: no psni in 1971 it was ruc and it was Irishmen who were tortured
@Peter McGlynn: what is the Southern Government you refrr to. Is it the Government of Ireland ? Refer to it properly please
@Peter McGlynn: think you left out a fella in between….
@joebloggs: You mean the Government of Ireland which is not under foreign rule? as opposed to the part of Ireland which is and was when the torture of those Irishmen happened.
It was the RUC that arrested the men in 1971, not the PSNI. It was British Army soldiers who tortured them in Castlereagh and other barracks. There is a very good book called ‘Cruel Brittania’ which gives the history of the use of ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques by the members of the Intelligence Corps. Don’t forget that the European Court of Human Rights decided initially that these techniques did not amount to torture.
@Patrick Brompton: Yes and we were part of EU while all this torture of Irish citizens was going on. That ruling also gave the go ahead to others to do the same the world over.
@Patrick Brompton: all very true and while not condoning the events these,are standard procedures used by many military organisations to extract information from captive and there fore expected by combatants. Further highlighting that army were not a suitable force to be engaged in what was a police role. All most all of this type of activity and other crimes attributed to the army was because they weren’t trained to deal with civilians. The use of military forces in support of the civil power is now widely accepted but should never be used in a policing role
@Barbara Coleman: and so was Brittania an EU member at the time.
Do you post Brexit that the European Court would more emphatically come down on the UK over its illegal dirty war if it was happening today?
@Paul Murphy: Sorry Paul, but that is a load of horse manure. Britain had been pulling – forced out of colonies all over the globe since the end of WW2, so dont tell us this was a new situation for them.
General Kitson had written a book/manual on how to deal with revolutionary movements in the occupied zones, how to turn communities and different political movements against one and other, and how its own forces could arrest, torture and beat confessions out of people, before their fates were decided.
What happened to the Hooded men was but one piece of Kitsons box of trix. The North in those early days was just one big testing ground in the British militaries experiments in counter Insurgency warfare, the far most important being the use and control of Loyalist Paramilitaries, including the Shankill Butchers, as the ultimate instrument in terror against the nationalist community. As we can see today, this was monster from Britains Pandora Box that cant be entirely switched off and put back in the box.
The RUC, just like its former self the RIC which was formed in 1825, was always a paramilitary police, which were armed like an army, stayed in Police Barracks, as opposed to police stations. The sectarian one-party state in the north survived its first 50 years by such a force.
For all the methods of torture, murder, black propaganda which were part of Kitsons bag of trix, they never managed to defeat the IRA or the community from which they took their support. In fact, the IRA came out of the war at the end, a lot, lot stronger than when they went into it in 1969.
@Patrick Brompton:
And ever since governments all over the world have used that ECHR decision to reject the alleged torture of suspects.
@Angela McCarthy:
The IRA goal was a United Ireland but almost 30 years have passed since their 1993 cease fire !?.
@Angela McCarthy: I take it you forget that the British Army were deployed to Northern Ireland to protect the Catholics from the Protestants and had never been deployed on what was considered to be home turf by the,UK government. The methods mentioned had been used before Kitsons book and are even in use to this day as the recent gameshow type event based on ARW depicts. It has been proven to this day that the UK government was neither forced out or pulling out of Northern Ireland and had the British Army been given free reign as in Malaya the IRA and others would have ceased to exist.
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