Sir, – Many Irish observers may not be aware that, in his infamous “torture memo” of August 1st, 2002, Jay Bybee, assistant attorney general in the administration of US president George W Bush, cited the case of Ireland vs the UK before the European Commission and subsequently the European Court of Human Rights in the 1970s as the principal example under international law to justify his contention that the use of sensory deprivation techniques (which dominate the US Senate report on US interrogation abuses since 9/11) did not amount to “torture”.
The governments of Jack Lynch and Liam Cosgrave in the early 1970s took the most important intergovernmental case on human rights in modern times against the UK government, citing hundreds of instances of inhuman treatment and torture against detainees in Northern Ireland and specifically alleging torture in the use of five “sensory deprivation” techniques (prolonged wall standing, hooding, subjection to noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink) against a number of men.
The case was pursued over several years before the European Commission on Human Rights in Strasbourg and elsewhere with admirable “tripartisanship” and without the slightest jingoism between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour leaders in government, an example of the Irish State at its best. The evidence was compiled from hundreds of sources in Northern Ireland, the most prominent being Fr Denis Faul, by officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs (I was one at the time). Several Irish counsel, junior and senior (Mr Justice Murray of the Supreme Court is the last active practitioner from that team) led by attorneys general Condon and Costello, confronted the most formidable names of the English Bar, including several of their attorneys general. Mr Lynch and Mr Cosgrave and their ministers and attorneys general resisted relentless pressure from their British opposite numbers, up to and including during the Sunningdale Conference, to drop the case. In 1976 the European Commission for Human Rights found that the use of the five techniques amounted to torture.
The European Court of Human Rights, the superior instance, changed that decision in 1978, grotesquely finding that the use of the five techniques “used in combination for a long period fall into the category of inhuman treatment, but not torture”. This was the decision relied upon by Mr Bybee in 2002 to justify many of the horrors now disclosed by the US Senate.
The initiative of the Minister for Foreign Affairs Charles Flanagan to try to have this case reopened in Strasbourg is important obviously for the survivors among the “hooded men” and for the families of all of them. It is also crucial for the world, including for the UK, whose prime minister has justly condemned the disclosures in the US Senate report. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL LILLIS,
Dublin 6.