Are British making same mistakes with Muslims they made with Irish?

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Gareth Peirce

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But despite her unassuming demeanour, there is no forgetting that Gareth Peirce has been credited as having almost single-handedly transforming the criminal justice scene in Britain. And when she speaks, you listen.

Peirce finds parallels between the suffocating blanket of suspicion faced by the Irish during the Troubles and the Muslim community today – as well as some differences.

“The last several years have found us in the midst of more such catastrophes than we could ever, in our worst nightmares, have dreamed of,” she says. “We could never have envisaged that the history of the new century would encompass the destruction and distortion of fundamental Angle-American legal and political constitutional principals in place since the 17th century.”

She believes it was injustice itself, again and again, that created and fuelled the conflict in the North of Ireland.

“To map its 33 year trajectory is to discover that before Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot and killed 13 unarmed Catholic demonstrators who were marching to demand not in fact a united Ireland but equal rights in employment, education and housing, the IRA was a diminished organisation, unable to recruit,” she says.

“After Bloody Sunday, overnight volunteers from every part of Ireland and every background came forward. Throughout the years of bloody armed conflict, every lawless action on behalf of the British state provoked a similar reaction - internment, shoot to kill, the use of torture, brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence.  All of this was registered at the time by the community most affected, while the British public, in whose name these actions were taken remained ignorant – that the state was seen to be combating terrorism sufficed.”

Muslim families around the world are now registering the ill-treatment of their community in Britain and recognising the analogies with the experiences of the Irish, who suffered similar injustices in decades past.

And  lawyer Peirce, who is now presenting her case for the innocence of Abdelbaset Ali al Magrahi - the man convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, says: “The right to a fair trial is in many ways difficult to articulate. If a defendant believes his or her prosecution is unjust, does he or she have any concepts to hand onto that are not entirely nebulous, unless they can prove, as those wrongly convicted in Birmingham or Guildford did, that their confessions had been brutally coerced? Or in the case of Judith Ward, where it was proved that the prosecution had withheld for 18 years evidence that disproved her claimed fantasies.”

Human rights legislation is a relatively new addition to British law. And Peirce asks if these rules can  be changed or if there are legal concepts that protect a community under blanket suspicion.

During the Troubles, the Irish had some allies. Peirce says: “Much current reminiscence ignores vital factors - above all the weight of the Irish Diaspora and the far-sightedness of those who began and maintained contact, long before Blair was elected and claimed the ultimate prize. Throughout the 30 years of conflict, 40 million Americans of Irish descent formed an electoral statistic no US administration could afford to ignore.”

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