Britain on Thursday won its appeal over a law to address the legacy of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, with the United Kingdom’s top court ruling the law did not breach a 2023 agreement governing post-Brexit trade in Northern Ireland.
The previous Conservative government’s Legacy Act was found by courts in Northern Ireland to be unlawful, including because it offered soldiers immunity from prosecution, though this element was repealed by the Labour government earlier this year.
Thursday’s ruling concerned cases brought by four claimants who were injured or their relatives were injured or killed between 1987 and 1997, a year before the Good Friday agreement which largely ended three decades of sectarian conflict.
The British government’s appeal centred on whether the Northern Irish courts were correct to disapply the immunity provisions in the Legacy Act as a breach of the post-Brexit agreement known as the Windsor Framework.
The UK Supreme Court ruled in the government’s favour, on the grounds that the claimants’ rights in European Union had not been diminished, so there was no breach of the Windsor Framework.
(Reporting by Sam Tobin）
