THE KILLING of Osama bin Laden “set a dangerous precedent”, solicitor Gareth Peirce told a Law Society gathering in Dublin last night.
It would “not have been impossible” to bring bin Laden to trial, said Ms Pierce, whose well-known cases included the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.
Ms Peirce said she was drawn to believe that America’s “plans a, b and c” were to kill bin Laden.
“You don’t get the feeling that much thought was given to him being captured and tried,” she said as she spoke at the society’s annual human rights lecture.
There was a “fine line” between lawful and unlawful killing with the circumstances of bin Laden’s death. This “fine line” was important for many reasons, she said.
She compared the situation to post-second World War when the British wanted to hang senior Nazis immediately but the US wanted a trial, resulting in the Nuremberg military trials. “If it were possible to try the leaders of Nazi Germany, bringing Osama bin Laden to trial would not have been impossible,” she said.
It was not clear if the information from the courier which eventually led the investigators to bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout was from torture. However, she said information from a torture situation was unlawful.
Ms Peirce’s lecture was on the topic “the use of torture and the death of justice”.
She said there was a paradox at this point in history between the vast state strength of the US and UK and the concept of a state’s extreme vulnerability to internal and external enemies. Both countries had struggled with the tension of “is the impermissible permissible?”, she said.
She spoke of the British complicity in torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay from ministers to senior civil servants and British soldiers. However, she said if the public at large could be persuaded to think torture was necessary then it could happen.
* Forthcoming legislation to allow criminal convictions to be declared “spent” should not be limited to six month sentences, the Irish Penal Reform Trust said yesterday.
Placing bans on certain jobs would fail to support large numbers who reformed, it said.
“This is an opportuinity to get it right not just an opportunity to pass weak moderate legislation” Liam Herrick, executive director of the trust said.
