Member

I want to make a wider point about the standards that we judge by. During the troubles, fatal shootings by British personnel were investigated by the military police until 1973, and by the Royal Ulster Constabulary after that. Since that time, article 2 of the European convention on human rights, which created a duty to investigate deaths to a standard that did not exist in domestic law at the time, has been applied to UK courts through the Human Rights Act 1998. The courts have since applied that duty retrospectively, which in my view is wrong. We cannot judge historical allegations against more modern legal tests that did not exist at the time.