ACCUSATIONS OF torture as state policy was a strong issue in the early 1970s as the Irish government’s formal complaints to the European Commission of Human Rights about the British government’s treatment of internees in the North were heard. The hearings were held in private but indications of the positions being taken by the British emerged in dribs and drabs, as in this report by Renagh Holohan from Stavanger in Norway, where some of the hearings were held in an air force base.
British security force claims over torture allegations
British defence witnesses, it is now known, who appeared at the European Commission of Human Rights here last week, gave evidence not only arguing that torture of internees was necessary in the extraordinary circumstances existing in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1971, but denying that some of the techniques described by internees were actually used.
The hearing, in which the Irish Government is alleging that the British security forces’ mistreatment of internees following the introduction of internment was an administrative policy and not, as the British are claiming, the result of individual excesses, is being held in camera, inside a high security air force compound and in conditions of extraordinary secrecy both inside and outside the courtroom.
Rarely has there been so little information available about a case of such importance and, to many on the Irish side of the argument, the deliberate decision by the secretary of the commission, Anthony McNulty, to release less information on this occasion than on previous occasions, is being seen as a pro-British bias that cannot be totally excused by the increased need for security . . .
The witnesses are all considered prime IRA targets as they are security force and military personnel, accused of torture by internees, and the complete blackout on the vague reports of the hearings appears to have been ordered by the British.
Procedural differences about how the witnesses should be identified in court delayed progress last week, but this has now been resolved in a rather novel way. While all but one of the five witnesses who have appeared have been known to the court by name, they are visible to only two of the senior counsel on the Irish side . . . by whom they are cross-examined, and are hidden by a plastic screen from the other nine members of the Irish team . . .
On Friday morning one well-known member of the RUC Special Branch spent nearly four hours in the witness box.
However, although partially screened, he was known by both name and reputation to all present and as one example of the type of evidence he was presenting it is known he told the court that the “white noise” of which internees detained at Palace Barracks, Holywood, complained was not caused by the security forces, as part of the disorientation technique, but came unavoidably from a nearby aircraft factory and could not be stopped.
The witness, like the others who appeared, did not concede that the techniques mentioned in the Compton Report actually took place and attempted, by such methods as the factory noise, to discredit the internees’ claims of ill-treatment.
The commission upheld the Irish complaint that internees were tortured but the European Court of Human Rights subsequently decided that five sensory deprivation techniques used by the security forces – continuous “white noise”; deprivation of sleep, and of food and drink; hooding; and wall-standing balanced on toes and fingers for long periods – amounted to “inhuman and degrading treatment” but it stopped short of describing them as torture.
For other stories making the news on this day in 1974 go to www.irishtimes.com/1974