Jeff Dudgeon: The witch hunt against state forces could be reinforced by the government's 'game changing' amendments to legacy

The secretary of state for Northern Ireland has promised "game changing" amendments to the government's legacy legislation, which has been heavily criticised. If these amendments are designed to appease legacy practitioners and Irish nationalist critics of the government's proposals then they will make the operation of the proposed Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) little different from existing lawfare – just a one-stop shop for witch hunts into the security forces.

I convene the Malone House Group (MHG), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) recognised at Strasbourg, which has been challenging the status quo of how the legacy of the Troubles is being examined. The past has been investigated in a completely one-sided way against the security forces, who killed only a fraction of the overall Troubles dead. Not only were such killings a small minority of the total, they were mostly legal. Yet rather than address this imbalance, the government is plainly yielding to the concerns of critics who take the opposite view to MHG: critics including Baroness O'Loan, the Labour Party's Lord Hain and Strasbourg (the Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic and the Committee of Ministers run by Dublin), not to mention Jon Boutcher of Kenova.

MHG has put in a request for a meeting with the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) minister, Lord Caine, and we await a possible date. We are aware the amendments made or promised by the NIO lean in one direction only. MHG was associated with about fifteen proposed amendments at committee stage. They dealt with many aspects of the bill, of a human rights nature (the never-mentioned Strasbourg Convention articles other than Article Two, which is always cited to justify the imbalanced focus on state forces) and on the dangers of one-sided academic funding of the memorialisation project. Sadly the DUP did not press for any of the amendments that could restrict lawfare or endless reinvestigations for fear of angering victims' groups.

We maintain the view that victims' justice is just as problematic as victors' justice and leads inevitably to the rewriting of history, as only the state will answer in court and provide files and paperwork. Everyone agrees that there can be next to no further prosecutions but pretend that is irrelevant.

We recognise the appointment of Sir Declan Morgan as the Independent Commission on Information Retrieval and Reconciliation (ICRIR) Chief Commissioner-designate is a critically important step and rather assume some of the relentless opposition to the bill will start fading, both locally and further afield. At the same time, there have been a number of recent court judgments in Belfast where it has been ruled that further legacy reinvestigations are pointless, hopeless, or not required. Combined with the earlier Supreme Court McQuillan and Finucane judgments (and the remarks by Lord Kerr in that case about the feasibility of another Finucane inquiry) it looks as if ICRIR can be both time and extent limited.

Robust UK responses in Strasbourg are however required and acceptance of some of the MHG amendments that can assist.

Jeff Dudgeon, Belfast BT9