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Brits Going Nowhere Soon

14/02/07

Further evidence has emerged this week of the continuing malign influence of the British government in the north-east of Ireland.

A group of British MPs, the ‘Joint Committee on Human Rights’, reported that restrictions placed on the work of the Northern Ireland (sic) Human Rights Commission would be a “severe blow” to the work of the organisation.

These restrictions will prevent the Human Rights Commission from raising questions about the activities of the British intelligence services in Ireland.

Furthermore the Commission will also be unable to access places of detention used by the PSNI and other British forces.

While much publicity has focused on the dismantling of part of the PSNI barracks in Crossmaglen, other elements of Britain’s counter-insurgency apparatus are quietly being modernised.

The non-jury Diplock courts will continue to operate at the behest of the Director of Public Prosecutions. These notorious courts were allegedly abolished recently with much fanfare. In addition British troops are to indefinitely retain powers of ‘search, arrest and entry’.

Commenting on the revelations, éirígí chairperson Brian Leeson said that they were proof that the modus operandi of the British government in Ireland remains the same.

“Normalisation according to the understanding of the British state means keeping all the apparatus of repression at the ready while talking the talk of peace processes and the ending political violence.

“These revelations demonstrate that the British government remains committed to institutional abuse of basic human rights. How can a peace process have any fundamental meaning when foreign troops are allowed to harass, raid and arrest with impunity? Those arrested by those same troops may well face trial not by a jury of their peers, but by judges who are inherently pro-British and anti-Irish.

“How can people have any faith in a justice system that prevents independent inspection of the detention centres where hundreds of nationalists, socialists and republicans have been tortured?

“This is yet another example, if one was needed, of how British rule in Ireland cannot be reformed. As long as they continue to occupy a part of Ireland they will maintain the means of repression and political violence – it was ever thus and will be ever so.”