Professor Kieran McEvoy:

Mr. Holder and I will both contribute opening remarks. I am a professor of law and transitional justice, working at the law school at Queen's University and at the Mitchell Institute. Mr. Holder is a member of the Committee on the Administration of Justice. The model Bill team is a team of academics, including me and my colleagues, Professor Louise Mallinder and Dr. Anna Bryson, working with colleagues from the Committee on the Administration of Justice, which is the main human rights NGO in the North. The work in which we have been involved through the past decade has been trying to find lawful and human rights-compliant ways to help deal with the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland. In that period, we have produced 20-odd reports. As we see it, our job as the nerds in this field is to produce accessible information that allows stakeholders to make up their minds on these difficult and controversial issues from as informed a position as possible. The way in which we have done that is to benchmark all our work against the European Convention on Human Rights, international law and domestic law in particular, as well as the Good Friday Agreement and the Stormont House Agreement. Everything we have done has been framed within that context.

We welcome the opportunity to again appear before the committee to give evidence. I and my colleague Dr. Bryson gave evidence to the committee in 2018. Mr. Holder was before the committee a few months ago. We have also given evidence to a range of committees at Westminster and to the US Congress. We have worked extensively with the United Nations, the Council of Europe and other international stakeholders.

Following the UK’s unilateral departure from the Stormont House Agreement which, it appears, includes the abandoning of the bilateral treaty signed by the British Government and the Government in the Republic, we have critiqued the proposals that have since emerged, from the UK command paper in 2021 onwards. As members are aware, that command paper proposed a general and unconditional amnesty. My colleague, Louise Mallinder, is probably the world expert on amnesties. She compiled a database of more than 500 amnesties from around the world and we were able to place the amnesty proposed in the command paper within that context. Our conclusion was that it was one of the most egregious in our database in terms of its scale and ambition and was significantly worse than that introduced by General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator in Chile. In addition to concerns in respect of the scale and ambition of the amnesty, we also raised our concerns about the gutting, as we termed it, of meaningful investigations into the conflict. In particular, our argument, on which we will expand, is that the piecemeal approach to dealing with the legacy of the conflict in the North has been providing, albeit in a rather slow and rumbling way, a version of truth recovery with teeth, using the legal powers of various legal and investigative mechanisms to ultimately deliver for families. We saw the command paper as, in effect, undermining that.

The command paper and the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill that is currently before Westminster were rationalised by reference to a deeply misleading and inaccurate series of information - in essence, fake news - relating to purported biased efforts to hold to account state actors in terms of investigations and prosecutions, thus calling into question the credibility of investigative mechanisms, the work of the PSNI, the Judiciary, lawyers and a range of other actors. That same fake news has been used to rationalise and justify the Bill that is currently before Westminster. The command paper was critiqued by the Council of Europe and the UN special rapporteur on transitional justice as a flagrant breach of the UK’s international obligations. The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights recently expressed serious concerns in respect of the new Bill. She released a statement to that effect last week. We expect to hear interest from the United Nations in respect of the new proposals that have come forward. It is our view that although these proposals are dressed up in the language of reconciliation, that is not a credible claim, not least because the claims relating to reconciliation that have been associated with the Bill in its passage through Parliament and in terms of how the UK Government has responded to concerns from the Irish Government and other stakeholders does not tally with what the Secretary of State and other political leaders have said in other formats. For example, the Secretary of State commented on the real rationale for the Bill which, it appears, is to ensure that state actors are not held to account, that there is a drive towards impunity for state actors. In our view, the reconciliation aspects of the Bill are window dressing to cover up for that.