Legacy Litigation
What is the KRW Legacy Litigation Department known for?
Conflict-related litigation developed from the Legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The lessons learned from the cases worked on and developed by the Conflict-Litigation Department are transferable to other post-Conflict transitional justice societies.
In Northern Ireland, throughout the course of the Conflict, there were systemic human rights violations and serious criminal acts committed by all participants across communities. Many of these human rights breaches and criminal offences remain unexplained and insufficiently investigated. They leave questions for the relative of the victims and survivors. These are questions about truth, justice and accountability which state-sponsored mechanisms of inquiry have failed to answer.
The unanswered questions of responsibility and accountability are what Legacy litigation seeks to answer and resolve.
In both public law challenges and civil litigation, complex and contested factual circumstances, this work serves to deliver truth to relatives and survivors across communities.
We work with survivor groups, civil society organisations, the media and academia to contribute to a resolution of the out-workings of the Conflict in order to progress truth recovery and accountability for the harms endured by those who instruct us. We contribute to important public dialogue on how best to resolve and progress the Legacy of the Conflict when state-sponsored systems have failed or denied.
Who are the Legacy Litigation Department?
The Department is led by Kevin Winters, Niall Murphy ,Setanta Marley and Associate Solicitors Michael Crawford, Barry O’Donnell, Gary Duffy and Owen Winters and Aine Rice. The team work on specific areas of legacy litigation and are assisted by Christopher Stanley, Anurag Deb, Liam Diver and Padraig McIlkenny.
Overview of the Work of the Legacy Litigation Department
The Department developed out the failures of state-sponsored mechanisms to resolve the out-workings of the violent Legacy of the Conflict in Northern Ireland.
It is acknowledged that truth-recovery and information-retrieval are core to processes seeking to establish reconciliation in post-Conflict societies. Understanding the truth about violence of a Conflict can contribute to maintaining peace.
The Good Friday Agreement 1998 sought to be the foundation for peace in Northern Ireland. It also sought to locate the post-Conflict society on a solid respect for human rights and compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Sadly, the mechanisms to deliver truth about the human rights violations and criminal offences committed of the Conflict have systemically failed. They have failed due to lack of resources (the Police Ombudsman, Legacy Inquests) or failures to conduct investigations in compliance with the standards demanded by the ECHR (the PSNI Historical Enquires Team).
The political and civil society initiatives suggested since the Good Friday Agreement 1998 have also failed due to political intransigence. The proposals of the Eames-Bradley Consultative Group on the Past 2010 were followed by the Hass-O’Sullivan Stormont House Agreement 2014 and the New Decade, New Approach proposals of the British and Irish governments 2020 were contested and refused leaving relatives of victims and survivors still seeking truth, justice and accountability.
It was clear from at least 2010 that collusion between the State and paramilitaries was at the core to many killings during the Conflict. The out-workings involved in securing the exposure of collusion on behalf of relatives and survivors is the point of contest which the most recent British government imposition seeks to win by closure and denial through the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2024.
We have utilized public law challenges (for example judicial review) and private law actions (for example civil litigation) to compel compliance with ECHR standards of investigation specifically when there has been a violation of Article 2 – the right to life (for example on behalf of the family of Eugene Dalton now pending before the European Court of Human Rights) – and Article 3 – the prohibition against torture (for example by the Hooded Men interned and tortured by the British Security Forces).
We have represented loved ones at contentious Legacy inquests where arguments over scope and disclosure have dominated (for example the IRA killings at Kingsmills 1976, the IRA pub bombings in Guildford and Birmingham 1974, the Loyalist-state collusion into the murder of Sean Brown 1997, RUC Shoot to Kill of unarmed suspects in north Armagh in 1982 and the SAS killings at Clonoe, county Tyrone in 1992).
We have developed civil litigation to plead collusion as a state-practice and successfully tested the tortious heads of loss and damage to secure disclosure of information on behalf of families and much needed compensation in the form of damages. Our litigation has encompassed challenges to the failure to resource Legacy-mechanisms (including the Police Ombudsman), the reliance upon the Neither Confirm Nor Deny by criminal justice-security agencies, the use of Closed Material Procedures to access sensitive material, the extent of sanctioned extra-judicial killings by the British Army, and the exposure of collusion leading to the killing of members of the British Security Forces, those alleged to have been informers and innocent civilians in order to protect agents.