On 3 September, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP, provided Parliament and the public with the fullest outline of the Labour government’s proposals to address the legacy of the Troubles since the Government took office last year. This research note draws attention to several troubling aspects of the Secretary of State’s statements, which seem likely soon to find their way into a government policy paper or draft legislation.  The UK government’s thinking about legacy policy seems driven primarily by a desire to placate the Irish government and to bring a close to the inter-state case brought by the Republic of Ireland against the UK before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.  The UK government seems to have adopted a contestable, maximalist understanding of Article 2 of the ECHR, which wrongly assumes that the conditional amnesty in the Legacy Act 2023, or a more categorical amnesty of the type that the Labour government proposed in 2005, is legally indefensible.  Finally, the UK government seems to have failed to challenge the Irish government on various aspects of its own position.  The note calls for Parliament and the public to scrutinise very carefully the proposals the UK government looks set to bring forward very soon.

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