UK suggests waiving Northern Irish 'Troubles' prosecutions

Britain's Northern Ireland Minister Brandon Lewis urged its Westminster parliament Wednesday to back his government's plan to legislate a halt to prosecutions of former British soldiers and Northern Irish paramilitaries, which, he said, would apply "equally to all Troubles-related incidents.''

Those three decades of conflict, until a 1998 peace agreement, cost 3,600 lives as mainly Protestant supporters of Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK fought mainly Catholic advocates of a united Ireland. 

Parties in Northern Ireland have expressed considerable skepticism at the plans, while Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said on Wednesday that Lewis' statute-of-limitation plan amounted to a general amnesty that was wrong "for many, many reasons."

Why does the UK think the step is necessary?

"This is not a position that we take lightly," Lewis had told parliament after the collapse in recent weeks of three murder trials of former soldiers.

At two of them former soldiers had been on trial over Catholic protesters killed in the "Bloody Sunday" massacre of 1972 and a youth killed in Londonderry that year.

Prosecutors said that the soldiers' statements given to military police in 1972 but without access to lawyers had become inadmissible under modern standards.

Lewis told parliament his statute of limitations bill would include an independent body tasked with uncovering and compiling information about Troubles-related deaths and injuries.

It was the "only way to facilitate an effective information retrieval and provision process, and the best way to help Northern Ireland move further along the road to reconciliation," he said.

Criticism from victims' groups, veterans' advocates

But Sandra Peake, executive of WAVE, a trauma group representing victims, on Wednesday described Lewis' plan as a "perversion of the criminal justice system."

Families were being told their loved ones' deaths "didn't matter," said Peake.

"Some families have not had the processes they should have had and that is simply wrong," said Peake, despite minister Lewis vowing to engage with victims' families.

British military veterans' commissioner for Northern Ireland Danny Kinahan said former soldiers "on the whole" did not want an amnesty. But society was not getting anywhere through the courts system, Kinahan also said.

Conservative MP Johnny Mercer, who until April this year was minister for military veterans' issues in Boris Johnson's Cabinet before being sacked, also issued a statement saying there were "much better, much more professional ways of dealing with the legacy of Northern Ireland, but this was always the simple answer." 

Renewed tensions in Northern Ireland amid Brexit

In 2010, a public inquiry into the "Bloody Sunday" shootings concluded that in January 1972 British paratroopers lost control. None of the casualties had posed a threat of causing death or serious injury.

Soldiers were first deployed in 1969 to keep the peace between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists but sectarian killings ensued.

On Monday, unionists paraded in Belfast, marking the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, when Protestant King William of Orange defeated Catholic King James II.

Those marches were tinged by Protestant groups' dissatisfaction with the special terms for Northern Ireland Boris Johnson's government agreed to as part of Brexit, which they see as a first step to prying Northern Ireland away from the UK and as a broken promise from the prime minister.

ipj/msh (Reuters, AP, AFP)