RSI gives evidence to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on the ‘Joint Framework on addressing the legacy of the past’
2nd October 2025
Yesterday, RSI gave evidence to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on the UK and Irish governments’ new ‘Joint Framework on addressing the legacy of the past’.
In this submission, we explain that:
- While the UK government’s proposals for a new framework to address the legacy of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland provide some scope for optimism in terms of compliance with the UK’s international human rights obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), we require much more information about how the government plans to implement these new laws and policies before we can make a definitive judgement about them.
- We perceive a risk that the Westminster government could fail to implement the ‘Joint Framework’ in a way that fails to effectively resolve the deficiencies in the regime established by the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023. Rather, these proposals could amount to a mere subtle reworking of the ICRIR, without the major steps needed to make the body ECHR-compliant and without sufficiently addressing the concerns of survivors and families who have already faced many broken promises of justice.
- We remain concerned, for example, that the new Legacy Commission could be limited by ministerial control over disclosure, a lack of sufficient independence from the UKgovernment, and the diversion of cases into a ‘fact-finding’ process, as opposed to one that could lead to criminal justice outcomes.
- In relation to the government’s ‘Proposals for Veterans’, it appears unlikely to us that the government could implement measures targeted at ‘protecting veterans from repeated investigations’ in a manner that also complied with the state’s obligations under the ECHR to reopen investigations into potentially unlawful killings (and other serious crimes) when new evidence arises.
- Considering the broader context, in which victims, survivors and their families have felt repeatedly ‘let down’ by successive governments reneging on prior promises, we believe the key to the reformulated ‘Legacy Commission’s’ success will be in its implementation, not in how the government frames its work.
- At a minimum, the Legacy Commission must be able to comply with the state’s obligations to effectively investigate potentially unlawful conflict-related deaths and torture, as per Articles 2 and 3 ECHR as well as the Convention against Torture. We encourage the Committee to consider our March 2025 report Holding the ICRIR to account: Key Performance Indicators for the investigatory body, which outlines whatwe believe the government needs to do to create a human-rights-compliant investigatory body for Troubles-related crimes.