Soldiers and police officers who served during the Troubles in Northern Ireland should not be prosecuted in relation to historical killings and torture, a Westminster committee has said.



The House of Commons defence select committee said a de facto amnesty granted to republican and loyalist paramilitaries under the 1998 Good Friday agreement should be extended to army and police veterans involved in killings and other incidents in the Troubles.

It wants the next British government to introduce an amnesty for police and troops who served in the region between 1969 and 1998.



Amnesty International said the findings were a betrayal of victims of state violence.

Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty’s Northern Ireland programme director, said: “The defence committee’s call today would in effect be the granting of a blanket amnesty for human rights abuses committed by former members of the security forces in Northern Ireland. It would be an utter betrayal of victims’ fundamental right to justice.”

In its report the cross-party group of MPs said there should be a “enactment of a statute of limitations, covering all Troubles-related incidents, up to the signing of the 1998 Belfast agreement, which involved former members of the armed forces.”

They added: “This should be coupled with the continuation and development of a truth recovery mechanism, which would provide the best possible prospect of bereaved families finding out the facts, once no one needed to fear being prosecuted.”

The committee pointed out that ex-IRA and loyalist paramilitaries could be granted immunity from prosecution over crimes committed in the Troubles before 1998. This had led during the period after the Good Friday agreement to hundreds of IRA and loyalist prisoners being freed early from jail.

The MPs want this de facto amnesty to be extended to former members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Last year two retired soldiers became the first members of the British military to be charged with murder in connection with a Troubles-related death.

The pair are being prosecuted over the killing of Official IRA commander John McCann, who was shot dead in central Belfast in 1972.

Amnesty International said the committee’s recommendations flew in the face of international human rights law.

Corrigan said: “All victims of killings and other human rights violations and abuses from Northern Ireland’s recent past have a human right to proper independent investigations, with the possibility of prosecutions to follow where the evidence leads.

“This is true whatever the identity of the victim and whatever the identity of the perpetrator. Any attempt at political interference with that fundamental principle debases natural justice and would be in breach of the UK’s international human rights commitments.”

Moves by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and the Historical Enquiries Team to investigate security force killings have been criticised by unionist politicians, loyalist paramilitary representatives and former senior army officers for allegedly being one-sided.

They claimed that the Historical Enquiries Team and the legacy investigations were overly focused on killings involving police officers and soldiers between 1969 and 1997.

The PSNI is also carrying out criminal inquiries into the actions of a number of British soldiers during the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972. No soldier has ever been prosecuted over the incident.

More than 3,500 people were killed during the Northern Ireland conflict, of whom 52% were civilians, 32% were security force members and 16% loyalist or republican paramilitaries. The IRA and other republican splinter groups killed the majority of victims (60%).