The European court of human rights’ decision to reject a request to rebrand as torture the maltreatment of 14 detainees by the British state at the start of Northern Ireland’s Troubles has been met with shock and dismay from the victims.
Known as the “hooded men”, the 14 men interned without trial in 1971 said the court’s refusal to redefine their ordeal at the hands of British troops and police as torture was a setback for the international campaign against torture methods.
By a vote of six to one, judges ruled that the original judgment, which said Britain was guilty of inhuman and degrading treatment but not torture, should still stand.
In a statement released from Strasbourg on Tuesday, the ECHR said the Irish government had not “demonstrated the existence of facts that were unknown to the court at the time” that would have a decisive influence on the original judgment.
The statement from the court concluded: “There was there no justification to revise the judgment.”
The Irish government, backed by human rights organisations, asked the ECHR in 2014 to revise its judgment. The only judge who voted on Tuesday to redesignate the case as torture was from Ireland.
The 14 men were subjected to white noise and put in stress positions after their arrest by British troops in August 1971. 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 that the men had been subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment but fell short of concluding they had been tortured. The ruling came after a complaint to Strasbourg from the Fianna Fáil government of the time.
The five techniques used against the men were hooding, stress positions, white noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and water. These were combined with physical assaults and death threats.
Some of the detained men were taken up in army helicopters, told they were high up and dropped a few feet to the ground.
One of the men who was thrown out of a helicopter while he had a hood over his head was Jim Auld. He was 20 when arrested by British paratroopers outside his parents’ home in west Belfast.
“I was coming back from a party around half past three in the morning when I turned up at my house and saw soldiers coming out of it. I remember a captain telling my mother: ‘Don’t worry madam I will make sure nothing will happen to him.’ I will never forget those words because of what really did happen,” Auld recalled.
After being taken to Girdwood Barracks in north Belfast Auld was run through a gauntlet of paratroopers who beat him with wooden bats. He was later handcuffed to an army camp bed next door inside Crumlin Road jail, kicked repeatedly in the genitals until he fainted and then propped up against a wall before being made to stand in the stress position, spreadeagled.
Later, less than two hours after he was arrested, Auld was hooded, taken up into a helicopter and then started to scream when he believed he was being “booted out” of the craft from a great height.
He was also brought hooded into what the soldiers called “the music room” where he was subjected to white noise.
Commenting on the ECHR ruling, the 67-year-old said: “The ECHR said I wasn’t tortured. Well if being hooded, beaten with bats, kicked repeatedly in the genitals, thrown out of a helicopter without seeing it was only a few feet off the ground, the stress positions and the white noise aren’t torture then I don’t know what is.”
Auld said he rarely talked about his ordeal during internment to friends or family “because I know it only brings on nightmares”. However, he said he was determined to talk about it now in order to highlight the global fight against torture.
“Like the rest of the hooded men I am shocked and dismayed by the ECHR’s decision not to brand this as torture. The court had a golden opportunity to strike a blow against torture worldwide if they had concluded we were tortured.”
The 14 men’s legal team at Kevin Winters law firm and Amnesty International vowed on Tuesday to continue the fight to overturn the original 1978 judgment.
Another of the men, Frances McGuigan, called on the Irish government to demand an appeal to the ECHR’s highest chamber. “Please, please, please take up our case,” McGuigan said.
In 2013 an RTÉ documentary, 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. This prompted the Irish government to demand a fresh investigation by the ECHR to find if this was torture.
The British government had 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.
Amnesty International’s Grainne Teggart said the human rights group was very disappointed over the court ruling. She said: “We believe the court has missed a vital opportunity to put right a historic wrong. Instead it relied largely on procedural arguments to avoid substantively revisiting its 1978 ruling.”