The former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams has been granted permission to appeal to the supreme court to challenge his convictions for attempted IRA jail breaks at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Three justices at the UK’s highest court have agreed to his lawyers’ request to reopen the cases, which relate to his internment in what was then Long Kesh detention centre in the early 1970s.

The decision by Lord Kerr, Lady Black and Lord Lloyd-Jones reverses a ruling by Northern Ireland’s criminal court of appeal.

Adams was interned, for a second time, in 1973 on an order made by a minister of state at the Northern Ireland Office. He attempted to escape in December that year and again in July 1974. He did not appeal afterwards against either conviction made for “attempting to escape from lawful custody”.

After the release of government papers under the 30-year archive rule, the supreme court said Adams was granted an extension of time to appeal against the convictions. At issue in the supreme court hearing will be whether his custody order, made under the Detention of Terrorists (Northern Ireland) Order 1972, was valid.

Adams’s lawyers have argued that because it was made by a minister of state rather than personally by the secretary of state his internment was illegal.

The first attempted escape was on Christmas Eve 1973 when it was alleged that four republican prisoners, including Adams, cut a hole in the prison fence and were intercepted before fleeing from the jail.

The second conviction concerned a 1974 plot by the IRA to kidnap a man who resembled Adams, dye his hair, put a false beard on him and then substitute him for Adams inside the prison.

Internment without trial was heavily criticised across the world, but did not end until 1975. By then nearly 2,000 people had been detained without trial, the vast majority of them republicans and politically uninvolved civilians from the Catholic community.