How Britain's treatment of 'The Hooded Men' during the Troubles became the benchmark for US 'torture

[deminks]

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/how-britains-treatment-of-the-hooded-men-during-the-troubles-became-the-benchmark-for-us-torture-in-the-middle-east-31009541.html

When Amal Clooney flies into Belfast shortly to meet a group of former Irish prisoners known as ‘The Hooded Men’ it will be the latest chapter of an extraordinary story concerning a quest for justice that has lasted almost half a century.

The international law and human rights specialist has joined the legal team representing all but one of the surviving men who say they were tortured under the British Government’s internment programme. More than 340 men were rounded up on 9-10 August 1971 but a group of just 12 were chosen for “deep interrogation” and subjected to hooding, prolonged stress positions, white noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink – the torture methods developed by the British Army during the Troubles and collectively known as the “five techniques”. Two more men suffered the same treatment later that year.

The Hooded Men won their case against the UK in 1976 when the European Commission of Human Rights ruled the techniques were torture, but the findings were overturned by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on appeal two years later. It ruled that while the five techniques amounted to “a practice of inhuman and degrading treatment” they did not cause suffering of the intensity and cruelty to constitute torture.

Francie McGuigan, one of the Hooded Men, told the Irish Times in a prophetic warning at the time: “I think Strasbourg has now allowed all countries to use a certain amount of what they classify as degrading and inhuman treatment.”

The 1978 ruling was subsequently used as justification for the George W Bush administration’s infamous ‘torture memos’ outlining what interrogation techniques could and could not be used on detainees. Shortly afterwards the CIA was using the five techniques in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world.

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