David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am somebody who is a royalist. I come from a southern unionist background. I am also aware that the Provisional IRA engaged in torture during this historical period.However, it is much worse when those activities are carried out by legitimate agents of the State. That is what I find utterly shocking. The men were innocent when they were suddenly lifted off the street. This is a human rights matter.

We hear a lot about western values and the United States and Britain charging into other countries all over the world in defence of western values, but they engaged in extraordinary rendition, torture and drone attacks where the most fundamental aspects of human rights, going back over many centuries, are routinely violated. What happened to the right to be presumed innocent? What happened to the right to face one's accuser? What happened to the right to be legally represented? Oh no. All of those can go. When Britain and the United States engage in these tactics, they are not speaking for me, and they are not speaking for western values. They are the very opposite of western values.

The European Commission on Human Rights found that this was torture. That should have been the end of it. There must have been intense diplomatic lobbying to get that changed to the mealy-mouthed verbiage of inhumane and degrading treatment. That is complete and utter nonsense. It says that if the case was tried now, it would be found to be torture. If it is torture now, it was torture 20 years ago. If an act is torture, it is torture simpliciter. It just has to be torture. It is also an extremely dangerous precedent. If this defective ruling is not challenged, it gives legitimacy to regimes all over the world which continue to engage in these disgusting practices. How can it not be torture to have somebody standing for 29 hours, as somebody said previously, in a stressed position? The muscles would be in agony after that. As for dropping people out of a helicopter, maybe it was from 5 ft off the ground, but the people who were being dropped did not know that. I am surprised that none of them died of heart attacks. I certainly would have been a prime candidate for a heart attack if it had happened to me.

On the question of the appeal to the Grand Chamber, of course they must do it. There should be no mealy-mouthed farting around about this sort of business. My decent friend, Senator O'Reilly, said that no appeal has ever been successful. I do not know whether that is true but it does not matter a damn whether it is because if we say we will not take an appeal because an appeal has never been successful, why not abolish the entire appeals process? There is no point in it if nobody will use it because so far nobody has been successful. That is outrageous. We must take that on. The Government has a moral obligation to defend the human rights of these unfortunate people who were so grotesquely and wrongly mistreated.

I intend no insult whatever to the Minister of State. He is a very good Minister and a decent Wicklow man, but I do not know what agriculture has to do with torture. The Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs should be here today.