STRASBOURG, France (CN) — The European Court of Human Rights refused Thursday to examine a British soldier's killing of a volunteer for the Irish Republican Army, saying it was satisfied with an Irish government inquest into the matter.
Martin McCaughey, 32, was shot 10 times, and another IRA member — Dessie Grew — was shot 48 times by British special forces in October 1990 on a farm in a rural area of County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The region saw three decades of sectarian strife before its status as part of the United Kingdom was cemented with the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
Northern Irish authorities initially refused to prosecute McCaughey and Grew's deaths, saying there was no evidence the shooting was anything but self-defense. The pair were carrying AK-47s and walking to a shed used for growing mushrooms that British intelligence believed was being used for weapons storage.
In 2011, however, after pressure from family members, authorities opened an inquest into the deaths. Ultimately a jury found that the events were a “lawful killing” because the nine British soldiers legitimately believed that their lives were in danger.
McCaughey’s sister, Sally Gribben, brought the complaint at hand, which the Strasbourg-based rights court ruled inadmissible Thursday.
Back in 2013, the same court had ordered the U.K. to pay 45,000 euros ($51,000) to the families of McCaughey, Grew and a third man, John Hemsworth, who was beaten to death by riot police in Belfast in 1990, for failing to properly investigate the deaths. The court found that the 20-year delay was caused, in part, by a failure of London to disclose documents.
Gribben repeatedly appealed the ruling that the killing was justified, arguing that the jury was not impartial and investigators refused to question the British soldiers about their involvement in other killings. The ECHR’s Fourth Section was unconvinced, ruling that, although the delay was a problem, the inquiry itself was effective. “Quite remarkably, after 20 years, all of the important witnesses, including all but one of the soldiers involved in the shooting, had given evidence,” the court said in a statement.
In particular, the court was concerned about becoming an “adversarial battlefield” where every aspect of a domestic legal proceeding could be debated. Created by the European Convention of Human Rights in 1959, the court requires applicants to exhaust all legal avenues in their home country before filing a complaint. The court had rejected another application from Gribben in 2016 on the grounds that she hadn’t fully appealed the decision of the inquest in the United Kingdom.
The Troubles were a three-decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland between the mostly Irish and Roman Catholic nationalists and the mostly British and Protestant unionists. In 1921, the U.K. government partitioned off the northern portion of the island of Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. The population was mostly descendants of British settlers, who considered themselves British and Protestant, but a significant minority were Irish Catholics. Hundreds were killed in violence that immediately followed the split, which has continued intermittently since.
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