The Irish and UK governments are about to clash in the European court of human rights over an infamous torture case involving the British army from the early years of the Troubles.

Dublin has decided to ask the ECHR to revise its judgment in the case of the hooded men – 14 suspects who said they were subjected to torture techniques during internment without trial in 1971.

The foreign minister, Charlie Flanagan, will make the request in light of recently unearthed military documents that appear to show Britain accepted that interrogation techniques used on the men amounted to torture. The evidence was revealed in an RTE television documentary in June this year.

In 1978 the ECHR admonished Britain for its inhuman and degrading treatment of the 14 prisoners but fell short of finding the UK guilty of torture. Last week several of the 14 lobbied the Irish parliament over the case.

Flanagan said: “The government is aware of the suffering of the individual men and of their families. The archival material which underlay the RTE documentary was therefore taken very seriously by the government and was subject to thorough legal analysis and advice. On the basis of the new material uncovered, it will be contended that the ill-treatment suffered by the hooded men should be recognised as torture.”

Amnesty International, which backed the men’s demand for the ECHR case to be reopened, welcomed the decision. Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty’s Northern Ireland programme director, said: “The then Irish government took a brave and unprecedented step when bringing the case against the UK back in 1971. Today’s Irish government has remained true to that pursuit of justice.

“Ireland is to be commended for playing its role in ensuring the UK is finally held responsible for what it did to these men in those interrogation rooms 43 years ago. We hope the UK government now announces without further delay the establishment of an independent investigation into what was revealed in the RTE programme.”

The decision averted a high court case that had been due to begin, brought by one of the hooded men, Liam Shannon, in an attempt to compel the Fine Gael-Labour coalition to challenge the 1978 ruling.

Shannon said: “We’re absolutely delighted by this. We’ve waited 43 years and we want to thank everyone involved – our legal team and all the researchers who turned up the relevant information in order that we could make a case, and we’d particularly like to thank Amnesty International for their assistance.”

The techniques inflicted on the detainees included hooding suspects, putting them into stress positions, sleep deprivation, food and water deprivation and the use of white noise. They were arrested as a result of the British policy of internment without trial in 1971 when thousands of suspects, mainly from Ireland’s nationalist-republican community, were rounded up.

Other detainees separate from the 14 have told the Guardian that they were blindfolded, put on to army helicopters and thrown out of the aircraft almost at ground level but unaware of their altitude.