UK security services helped devise act that gave amnesty over Troubles killings | Northern Ireland

Despite MI5’s role in many murders during the Northern Ireland Troubles, it has been revealed that British security services were also involved in the formulation of the controversial Succession Act, which offered amnesty to soldiers and paramilitary forces.

The presence of police and government figures among a secret group of policymakers involved in drafting the law is a fact revealed by an investigation by the Belfast-based newsletter. detail and was shared with the Guardian – angering victims’ groups who were already criticizing the legislation.

The conditional immunity of the 2023 law, which the current government abolished after the vote in January, was opposed by all political parties in Northern Ireland, although sometimes for different reasons.

Daniel Holder of the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), a Belfast-based NGO, waged an eight-month battle to have documents relating to the former high-level working group released after freedom of information requests were initially rejected.

Sharing documents marked “official secret” with Detail, Holder said: “Some details of the group have only now emerged. The high-level inheritance investigations working group was set up behind closed doors to help develop what became the Boris Johnson government’s infamous Inheritance Bill.”

“Despite legal duties to ensure effective and independent investigations into cold cases involving security forces, the group tasked with advising on how the policy should be developed itself heavily includes police and security figures.”

The revelation that the security services were involved in the formulation of the law reinforces long-standing public concerns that the security and police services are behind the Old Law and the independent Reconciliation Commission (ICRIR) it set up to investigate the cases. A previous attempt to address legacy issues, the Historical Investigations Team, was terminated in 2014 after it was found to have failed to properly investigate state killings.

Holder said the legislation that emerged from the meetings “led to the closure of hundreds of cases on May 1, 2024, under the then-existing legacy mechanisms, replacing them with the disastrous ICRIR, which has yet to complete a single case in over two years.”

Members of the group, which was founded in 2020, included former Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) chief commissioner George Hamilton and Madeleine Alessandri, who was the UK’s deputy national security adviser until 2020 before being appointed permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office. Another attendee, Chloe Squires, was the Home Office’s director of national security at the time of the meeting. The rest of the participants worked for the state or had connections to it, particularly the state’s police and security apparatus.

Minutes from the meeting recorded Hamilton as saying: “Families will welcome information recovery. It is a small minority who will present legal challenges and we must be prepared for that, but they do not speak for the silent majority who just want to move on.”

In response, Mark Thompson of Relatives for Justice said: “I cannot describe the 1,100 grieving relatives [reflecting the number of civil cases lodged by bereaved families when the Legacy Act was introduced] Number of murder victims, including torture victims, demanding answers as a ‘small and vocal minority’.”

He added: “It was not lost on all these families that the individuals making these comments represent the same government agencies that would be subject to robust, independent investigations with full accountability if such a process existed.”

Another published document presented a list of suggested talking points for the head of the secret group. He underlined the government’s target of concluding investigations into the 3,500 deaths during the Troubles “within two years”, a timeframe he considered “ambitious”. “A key component of the policy package is the intention to impose a legal bar on further criminal investigations or prosecutions as a means of providing certainty to veterans and victims and ‘unlocking’ further information recovery opportunities,” the statement said.

Documents show that the former high-level working group met on June 19 and July 20, 2020. The files state that a third meeting was planned, but no further information was released and a government source said it did not take place.

Holder said the group’s existence “only became apparent by chance when then PSNI chief constable Simon Byrne told a Westminster committee that the PSNI had refused to join the group to remain neutral”.

A Northern Ireland Office spokesman said: “This relates to a group set up by the previous government to discuss matters relating to the development of the Inheritance Act, which this government has repealed and replaced.”

Hamilton said: “I am viewing the minutes almost six years after the incident. In light of this I cannot confirm that any of the comments attributed to me were recorded accurately…

“My agreement to be part of the working group was to ensure that lessons learned from previous initiatives on old investigations were understood and that learnings were not lost in drafting new proposals. Most importantly, I emphasized the importance of victims and families being at the center of any investigation, review or recovery of information.”

He also said the quotes he said were selective and taken out of context.