Home Secretary seeks hostages
It could have been, as a letter in The Guardian observed, the Straw
which broke the back of the peace process. The British Home
Secretary's failed attempt in Belfast High Court to block the release
of Patrick Magee, Thomas Quigley, Paul Kavanagh and Joe McDonnell on
Monday was, even by their own standards, an astonishingly crude
attempt by the British Government to exert pressure on Sinn Fein
ahead of the deadline next week for the setting up of the new
Executive. The message was this; either decommission or we will hold
these men and others as political hostages for the foreseeable
future.
It also came at a time when Unionists, the RUC and the British
Government were being thrown on to the defensive as more revelations
about collusion, intimidation and threats come to light in the
aftermath of Rosemary Nelson's assassination. The legal machinations
by the Home Office could justifiably be intrepreted as an attempt to
move political attention away from such uncomfortable questions and
back on to decommissioning.
As perhaps the most serious crisis for the negotiations so far loomed
on Monday afternoon, Jack Straw offered the rather feeble explanation
that the extraordinary move was simply a means of ensuring that
English law was being rigorously applied - although this is something
which the Home Office has failed to do on many notorious occasions.
Straw's argument to the High Court was based on the fact that the
four men were sentenced in England and transferred to Long Kesh and
thus that, as transferred prisoners, different rules applied with
regard to the proportion of the sentence to be served. However, the
1998 legislation on the release of political prisoners, enacted as
part of the Good Friday Agreement, makes it abundantly clear that
transferred prisoners are to be treated in exactly the same way as
those convicted in the Six Counties. In the High Court, Mr Justice
Girvan dismissed the case, telling the Home Office's legal
representative that the Northern Ireland Sentencing Review Commission
had acted entirely within its powers in allowing the release of the
four.
Straw was accused by Sinn Fein and others of attempting to directly
interfere with current negotiations, a charge which he tried
unconvincingly to refute by claiming that the legal action to block
the releases had been in train for some four months. This claim
sounds unlikely given that, at the same time, the press was led to
believe that the Northern Ireland Office knew nothing about the
action and that Mo Mowlem was `incandescent' at the news. If the Home
Office initiated the legal action months ago, it would seem
incredible if it had not been discussed and sanctioned at Cabinet
level - including Dr Mowlem.
If, however, the NIO genuinely did not know about the legal action,
whether or not it was only initiated the day before the release were
due to take place, the charge of direct political interference with
the peace process by elements of the British Government and of making
prisoners hostages to the demand for decommissioning, becomes more
urgent still. Further, if the latter scenario were the case and
information was deliberately withheld from the NIO, the affair could
also suggest serious tensions within the Government itself in its
approach to negotiations.
But either way, Jack Straw and by extension the entire British
Government have been badly humiliated in one of their own courts of
law and the three prisoners were freed late last night. Pat Magee is
due for release in June.
Sinn Fein's Alex Maskey, who was in court throughout the hearing said
last night that the decision was ``the right one. Despite the Judge's
antipathy to the Good Friday Agreement and the early release
programme, he nonetheless found that the British Home Secretary had
no grounds for halting the release''.
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