Editorial: For once, the Northern Ireland courts who have been so influential on legacy are humiliated by the UK Supreme Court

The Supreme Court judgement on legacy yesterday was one of huge implications for how the past is handled.

​It was a comprehensive defeat, indeed humiliation, for the way in which the Belfast courts have interpreted Troubles investigations.

The case had a lengthy title: ‘In the matter of an application by Martina Dillon, John McEvoy, Brigid Hughes and Lynda McManus for Judicial Review (Respondents)’.

The ruling by the UK’s highest court was very long, and ran to almost 100 pages.

The key things that you need to know are this: The outcome brings a check to the expansive interpretations of the Windsor Framework – the Irish Sea border – as pushed by activists like the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Northern Ireland Equality Commission. We add our voice to that of Jeff Dudgeon, opposite, and Jim Allister KC, that the leaders of these bodies should consider their positions.

They were by no means alone in their activism, which has spread far into the universities and legal worlds but also the business world, a community that once treasured this province’s deeply integrated place in the UK and its internal market.

Other key parts of the ruling related to whether or not the previous government’s conditional amnesty scheme was illegal under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and whether the Independent Commission on Reconciliation and Information Retrieval (ICRIR) was capable of carrying out ECHR-compliant investigations. While the NI Appeal Court found that it was not capable of that, the Supreme Court found that it was.

Even in the only key respect in which the NI Appeal Court was perhaps vindicated, the question of whether conditional amnesties might be permissible under ECHR, the Supreme Court said that had not been decided by Strasbourg. It did not deem such an outcome impossible.