2023-09-03 22:46:03
The text, presented in May 2022, proposes to drop legal proceedings relating to the Northern Irish conflict for British soldiers and paramilitaries who decide to cooperate with the authorities.
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More than 3,500 people died during the three decades of conflict in Northern Ireland between Loyalists, mainly Protestants, and Republicans, mainly Catholics. Some 1,200 deaths are still under police investigation, according to the British government. For London, the law must make it possible to close hundreds of these unsolved cases.
Also read: Northern Ireland’s unresolved past
But the bill, whose examination must continue next week in the British Parliament, is criticized by the families of victims, the entire Northern Irish political class, the Irish government, as well as by the Council of the Europe, which recently expressed its “deep concern” over the failure of the United Kingdom to resolve the differences around this text.
However, the law has been welcomed by veterans’ associations, which believe that some soldiers have been the subject of unfair prosecutions. In November 2022, for the first time since the end of the conflict in 1998, a former British soldier, David Holden, received a three-year suspended prison sentence for killing a man in 1988 with a bullet in the back to a checkpoint.
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