Amnesty International demands UK inquiry into hooded men case

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/05/amnesty-international-uk-inquiry-hooded-men-case-echr

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Amnesty International has called for an independent UK investigation into the alleged torture of 14 suspects detained by the British army at the start of the Troubles.

The human rights organisation demanded the inquiry on Friday after the Irish government asked the European court of human rights (ECHR) to revise its judgment in the case of the hooded men, who were detained without trial in 1971.

The men were subjected to white noise and put in stress positions after their arrest by British troops in August that year. They were detained during the roundup of thousands of mainly nationalist men in response to the deteriorating security situation.

Seven years later, the ECHR ruled the men had been subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment but fell short of concluding that they had been tortured. The ruling came after a complaint from the Fianna Fáil government of the time in Dublin to Strasbourg.

Amnesty has backed the men’s campaign for decades and the Irish government confirmed this week that it would ask European judges to re-examine the case.

Thomas Hammarberg, the original Amnesty researcher in the case, met a number of the men in Belfast on Friday.

Hammarberg, a former Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, said: “Time does not heal all wounds if justice is not done. I led an Amnesty delegation to Belfast over 40 years ago to investigate allegations we had received of brutal interrogation methods combined with measures of ‘sensory deprivation’. It was obvious to us that these were very grave human rights violations, indeed amounting to torture.”

He said he had been deeply disappointed in 1978 when the ECHR ruled that the army’s interrogation techniques did not amount to torture.

The five techniques were hooding, stress positions, white noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and water. They were combined with physical assaults and death threats to the men.

Last June, an RTÉ documentary called The Torture Files showed documents uncovered from the UK national archive revealed that the government knew its core argument – that the effects of techniques used on the hooded men were not severe or long-lasting – was untrue.

The British government fought a vigorous legal action in 1978 to absolve it of the “special stigma” of its armed forces being found guilty of committing acts of torture.