1.Were the SAS acting under government instructions when they shot dead three IRA members on a bombing mission to Gibraltar on 6 March 1988? The ambivalently negative answer recently supplied by the European Court of Human Rights has infuriated the Government and re-opened the whole question of whether Britain should now enact its own Bill of Rights. There is no dispute about the basic facts of the case, which was brought by relatives of the three deceased. Mairead Farrell was shot five times in the head and neck and three times in the back from a distance of about three feet. Daniel McCann was hit by five bullets, twice in the back and three times in the head. A pathologist later agreed that the third IRA member Sean Savage had been 'riddled with bullets' in what looked like a 'frenzied attack'. He was hit 16 times, with a number of bullets entering his head while he lay on the ground. Witnesses to the shootings of Farrell and McCann also claimed they had been shot while on the ground, and some observers suggested that they might have attempted to surrender. The European Court had to decide whether killing them in this way infringed their(qualified)right to life under Article Two of the European Convention on Human Rights.

LRB 16 November 1995 | PDF Download