With Europe watching, new hope in courts

Irish Times/by Jim Dee

Sunday, April 8, 2001

CARRICKMORE, Northern Ireland - A wry smile crosses Gerard Magee's face as he finishes summarizing a 12-year ordeal that ended Friday when a Belfast judge ruled he'd been wrongly jailed for a decade for Irish Republican Army offenses.

``Even here there's an attitude of `Well, what's new about that?' '' says Magee, 36, who was finally released under the Good Friday Agreement in September 1998.

Indeed, given the precedents of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four - jailed for 17 and 15 years respectively before their convictions were quashed - to Danny McNamee and Billy Gorman - who've cleared their names since being released in the 1990s - news that Irish men and women were unjustly jailed for lengthy periods no longer shocks anyone.

``We've been so acclimatized to the extraordinary circumstances in the North of Ireland that they just seem normal,'' Magee adds, ``but just because we're accustomed to conflict and injustice doesn't make it acceptable.''

Magee, then a member of Sinn Fein, was one of 15 people arrested in Antrim at the end of 1988, a day after the discovery of an unexploded IRA land mine.

Charged with conspiracy to murder and IRA membership, he was convicted solely on the basis of a confession he claims his Royal Ulster Constabulary interrogators beat out of him.

He said that his interrogators pressed his face and chest hard against walls, slapped him repeatedly on the back of the head (above the hairline, so no bruises showed) and held lit cigarettes below his chin, close enough for pain but not burns.

Eventually, he broke and signed an RUC-penned confession ``because my mind wasn't focused. I was lying in a heap on the floor, wrecked and dehydrated, totally exhausted.''

Since its 1977 opening, human rights groups in Ireland and abroad have regularly alleged the beating of prisoners was common in Castlereagh, which finally closed in December 1999.

After Castlereagh, Magee was tried before a single judge in the North's controversial juryless Diplock courts, which boasted conviction rates in excess of 90 percent, most of them based on confessions.

Sentenced to 20 years in 1991, he began writing letters protesting his innocence to human rights groups. He said New Jersey lawyer Ed Lynch became a key advocate. In 1994, after losing all appeals in Britain, he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.

Last June, that court ruled Magee's right to a fair trial was violated because he was denied access to a lawyer for two full days after his arrest. The ECHR also specifically cited the ``intimidating atmosphere specifically designed to sap his will'' as central to its finding that his human rights had been violated.

Since Britain codified European human rights legislation last fall, it is now bound by ECHR rulings. As such, last June's ruling forced a Belfast appeals court to hear Magee's appeal in January. On Friday, Judge Robert Carswell issued his ruling that, under the ECHR guidelines, Magee's conviction was ``unsafe'' and overturned it.

In a crucial statement, the judge added that ``if other cases come before us concerning admissions made in Castlereagh . . . we shall take the ECHR's decision in the present case into account.'' This refers to a potential flood of future appeals by prisoners who were also denied immediate access to legal counsel during RUC detainment.

Since leaving prison, Magee has relocated 50 miles away from Antrim, to Carrickmore, because he's now a potential target for dissident pro-British loyalist paramilitaries, who are firmly rooted in Antrim's sprawling loyalist housing developments.

He's again working for Sinn Fein and says his ordeal has strengthened his belief that the RUC must be abolished as part of the radical societal transformation necessary to achieve lasting peace.

``State oppression itself fueled conflict, it didn't resolve conflict,'' he said. ``It was part of life, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable. People here have the same entitlement to justice and equality and freedom as everywhere.''