Multilateralism, Human Rights and the 1970s: Insights from Ireland's Role in the Development of the Human Rights Field

The Ireland v United Kingdom case concerns the treatment of detainees by British security forces in Northern Ireland and the implementation of internment or detention without trial, introduced in Northern Ireland in 1971. By reading human rights ‘as a language’ and ‘an endless semantic battlefield’, we explore how the Irish government in the Ireland v United Kingdom case sought to use the European Convention of Human Rights strategically as a legal outcome before a regional human rights institution to secure its own political assessment of internment and the controversial interrogation methods. We focus on two strategic moves that the Irish legal team pursued at the ‘admissibility’ and ‘merits’ stages of the European Commission of Human Rights proceedings, namely, submitting a wider range of allegations, alongside Article 3 allegations, as an administrative practice, and advocating for the hearing of expert testimony on the use of the interrogation methods (the ‘five techniques’). We explore these strategic moves in order to illustrate the semantic battlefield in operation and understand the potential limits of the strategic use of human rights as a language. This article is based on the authors' contribution to a roundtable at the annual conference of the International Affairs Standing Committee of the Royal Irish Academy, titled ‘Multilateralism and Interdependence: Prospects and Challenges’, which took place at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin on 2 May 2018. Dr Aisling O'Sullivan is a lecturer in Law in Sussex Law School and a researcher in the Sussex Centre for Human Rights Research at the University of Sussex, and Dr Roja Fazaeli is a lecturer in Islamic Civilizations in the School of Languages, Literature and Culture at Trinity College Dublin, and chairperson of the Immigrant Council of Ireland. The authors' paper forms part of their larger edited book project on Ireland's role during the evolution of the field of human rights law, which will be published by Routledge in 2019.