The High Court of Belfast has sided with the Government of the Republic of Ireland, and the victims of the Ulster conflict, by considering that the amnesty law approved by London to wipe the slate clean with the Northern Irish conflict goes against of the European Convention on Human Rights.
British Conservatives pushed through controversial legislation to protect soldiers, police and members of the intelligence services accused of murdering Catholics in Ulster, in collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. Although in turn it also protected IRA militants responsible for attacks outside Northern Ireland and those against whom, for whatever reasons, charges had not been brought until now.
Survivors and relatives of victims, from both sides, are against the law because they believe that it deprives them of access to justice. The ruling of the Belfast High Court, two hundred pages long, agrees with them by pointing out that it does not see how the amnesty “would serve to improve relations between the two communities, but rather the opposite.”
The legal journey of the issue, however, has only just begun, and there are various instances to be exhausted before it reaches the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights, to which the coalition Government already addressed a few months ago. Irish, in a decision that deeply irritated the British. It may take a decade until there is a final resolution.
By then, in any case, the United Kingdom may no longer abide by the authority of Strasbourg and be outside the European Convention on Human Rights, something increasingly demanded by eurosceptics and the far right of the Conservative Party, and that would become a reality if Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick or other potential candidates to replace the current premier, Rishi Sunak, live in Downing Street in the future.
In addition to the amnesty for crimes committed before the signing of the Good Friday agreements of 1998, the law prohibits new investigations and civil actions related to the troubles, as the civil war that lasted for three decades and claimed 3,600 is known. lives.
One of the central elements of these agreements, obtained by Tony Blair with the mediation of the United States, was the release from prison of 460 paramilitaries (mainly Republicans, but also loyalists). That amnesty did not apply, however, to members of the British armed forces and intelligence services or to those responsible for planting bombs in England and Scotland.
