22 March 2018
The European Court of Human Rights has rejected a request to find that a group known as the ‘hooded men’ who were detained during internment in Northern Ireland in 1971 suffered ‘torture’. In 1978, the Court ruled that the UK had carried out inhuman and degrading treatment but fell short of defining this as torture. The Irish government had asked the Court to revise its original judgment. The 14 hooded men said they were beaten, forced to stand in the stress position and deprived of sleep, food and water. One man was blindfolded and thrown from a helicopter, which he was told was hundreds of feet in the air.
