NI: Northern Ireland: Gibraltar and Beyond (feature)
01 September 1995
Seven years and six months after the SAS shot dead three IRA volunteers as they strolled through the streets of Gibraltar, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled once again that the United Kingdom has violated the European Convention on Human Rights. The ruling, delivered on 27 September, was in regard to Article 2 of the Convention concerning the "right to life". It is the first occasion that the Court has sought to draw a line on the circumstances in which it is permissible for a state to take actions which may result in loss of life, in the wider interests of defending people from unlawful violence. The ruling, which was by a narrow majority of 10-9, overturned a previous judgement by the Commission. The Court further ruled that the allegation that the killings were premeditated, in the sense that there was a plot to execute the three at the highest levels within the Ministry of Defence and government, was unsubstantiated.
The Court pointed out that it was not assessing the criminal responsibility of those directly or indirectly concerned. It accepted that the soldiers honestly believed that it was necessary to shoot the suspects to prevent them from detonating a nonexistent bomb and causing serious loss of life. But it argued that, by training, the SAS's use of firearms "automatically involved shooting to kill" and that such reflex actions "lacked the degree of caution in the use of firearms to be expected from law enforcement personnel in a democratic society, even when dealing with terrorist subjects". In deploying soldiers "trained to continue shooting until suspects are dead", there was a special onus on the authorities to control arrest operations carefully. This they had failed to do.
The Gibraltar killings were part of an extraordinary chain of events which began at least three months before the killings themselves and ended with eight people dead, two badly wounded, a further sixty-six hurt and more than forty people arrested and tried, including five people given double life sentences, convictions which have been the subject of serious controversy ever since (see Statewatch vol 2 no 4 & vol 3 no 1). The three IRA members, Mairead Farrell, Danny McCann and Sean Savage, were killed on Sunday 6 March 1988. They were flown to Dublin nine days later on Tuesday 15 March. The next day, the three were buried in the Republican plot at Milltown cemetery on the Falls Road in Belfast. As mourners gathered round to see the first coffin being lowered into the grave, loyalist Michael Stone
approached from the adjoining motorway, where a police van had also been spotted, and began to hurl grenades at the crowd. Stone's weaponry, which included a pistol, was part of the consignment of fragmentation grenades, AK47 rifles, pistols and a dozen rocket launchers brought from South Africa in January 1988 in order to re-equip the three loyalist groups, the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Resistance. The shipment of these weapons was organised by Brian Nelson and Charlie Simpson who both worked for British intelligence (see Statewatch vol 2 no 2 & vol 3 no 2). Although Stone was clearly heavily armed, some of the mourners turned on him and began to chase him towards the motorway. As they caught up with him, the police intervened and took him into custody. Stone had killed three of the mourners, including republican activist Kevin Brady. Brady's funeral took place the following Saturday (19 March). As the funeral cortege proceeded down Falls Road, a car containing two British soldiers from the Royal Corps of Signals, Corporals Derek Wood and David Howes, drove towards the mourners, reversed in panic and then was stopped by the mourners. Once again, mourners believed they were under attack and indeed the soldiers had drawn their guns, one firing a shot in a desperate attempt to escape. They did not. As the international news cameras recorded, the two soldiers were dragged from the car, strippe