Aoife Duffy - Torture and Human Rights in Northern Ireland: Interrogation in Depth

for my family

In the early morning of 9 August 1971, the British Army, working with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), launched Operation Demetrius, the arrest phase of an operation that re-introduced internment to Northern Ireland. By the following day, 342 men had been arrested. From this pool of detainees, 12 men were selected for deep interrogation. Deep interrogation or interrogation in depth was a system of interviewing detainee suspects developed within the Joint Services Intelligence Wing of the British Army, which entailed sensory deprivation (hooding, subjection to white noise), sleep deprivation, stress postures, and reduced diet. Within British Army training protocol, it was well recognised that these techniques, when used in combination, could make a suspect more malleable to questioning. Furthermore, it was understood, prior to the Northern Ireland operation, that such a systematic psychological attack could result in psychotic episodes, overwhelming pressure, and mental breakdown. Some of the techniques were used in isolation during colonial counter-insurgency encounters (such as in Brunei, Swaziland, Kenya, and Malaya), and were subsequently refined and implemented as a system in Aden, Oman, and Muscat. In a sense, the Northern Ireland story is unique because it resulted in a precedent setting inter-state application by the Irish state against the United Kingdom to the regional human rights machinery at Strasbourg, France. Modern normative thinking on the distinction between torture, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment stems from the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights consideration of the effects of the systematic application of these 5 techniques on 14 individuals the hooded men.