May 8 1974
The Association for Legal Justice last night expressed its strong dissatisfaction at British Minister Mr Roy Hattersley’s reply to the former Conservative Attorney-General that the charges against Britain before the European Commission on Human Rights of inhuman and degrading treatment of persons in custody in Northern Ireland would be, as he said, “contested vigorously”.
“How this squares with Lord Gardiner’s comment in his minority report that the hooding treatment alone was a breach of ordinary civil law, it is difficult to say,” said the association.
Mr Hattersley’s intransigent attitude demonstrated that in the realm of basic human rights, the return of a Labour government simply meant, so to speak, replacing Tweedledum with Tweedledee.
Further evidence of this could be seen at the Northern Ireland Office itself where Mr Merlyn Rees continued his penal policy of internment and massive arrests of innocent persons, hauled off for interrogation to the nearest military post.
“For how much longer is the present British government going to associate the Labour movement generally with these unacceptable practices,” the association asked.
The association was of the opinion that instead of presenting government witnesses to give evidence from behind the curtain in support of a bad case at the Norway hearings, the British Labour government should be taken active steps to offer redress to the men who suffered the hooding treatment as well as the many others subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment.
This, together with the immediate ending of internment and an all-out drive against the sectarian assassins, were surely urgent steps that needed to be taken to help restore confidence and a return to some semblance of normality.
With Mr Rees determined not to abolish the Emergency Provisions Act and Long Kesh still “bulging at the seams”, the British government’s case before the European commissioners, already weak in itself, was further confounded by these additional abrogations of basic human rights.
The continued forcible feeding now over a very long time of the Price sisters and other Irish prisoners must surely be noted by the many European human rights organisations now making preparations for a further meeting this summer, following Amnesty International’s conference in Paris for the abolition of torture, last December, when the ALJ delegation first brought to their notice the inhuman treatment of these young people.