Special Category Status
The special category status (SCS) guaranteed William Whitelaw , the Secretary of State appointed by the British government in Northern Ireland , for all political prisoners of the Northern Ireland conflict , the offenses were committed. This was one of the terms the Provisional IRA negotiated in a meeting with the British government when a ceasefire was reached and Gerry Adams' internment lifted in return .
The SCS status or political status was de facto equivalent to the recognition of a prisoner of war status and meant that the privileges that are enshrined in the Geneva Convention came into play . The Republican prisoners were not required to wear prison clothing or do prison labor. This also meant that the prisoners could live in paramilitary groups, were entitled to special visits and to receive food packages.
Confrontation between the political prisoners and prison guards resulted in arson and the destruction of other prison facilities at Maze Prison , also known as Long Kesh . When, in January 1975, the Gardiner Committee examined how the British government was dealing with terrorism in Northern Ireland with regard to freedom and human rights in the Northern Ireland conflict, it recommended the termination of the SCS. The commission argued that the special status undermines the prison administration's job of maintaining discipline. The Republicans responded with off-prison violence to six employees who died between 1976 and 1977.
The government took up the Commission's recommendation and the new Labor government announced the termination of the SCS on March 1, 1976 through Merlyn Rees , their Secretary of State in Northern Ireland. Every prisoner accused of terrorist offenses after March should be treated like an ordinary criminal after March 1st, had to wear a prison uniform, do prison work and serve his sentence in the new Maze Prison, also known as the H- Blocks became known.
In the late 1970s, the new prison with single cells was completed according to the recommendation of the Gardiner Commission, so that the first prisoners could be admitted. The week Roy Mason took over as Secretary of State from Merlyn Rees, Kieran Nugent was the first prisoner to enter Maze Prison under this new policy to be ordered to wear prison clothing.
Nugent refuses to put on the uniform and replied that he was a political and not a criminal prisoner. He was locked away in his cell and there he put on the blankets that were on his cell bed and remained naked under the covers. This was the same action IRA prisoners took in southern Ireland in the 1940s. With that, the Blanket Protest was born again, and soon other prisoners followed suit. In 1978, about 300 Republican prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms.
The Blanket Protest escalated into the Dirty Protest and the two hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981 , with ten Republican prisoners killed in the 1981 strike, including Bobby Sands .
Individual evidence
- ^ Kieran McEvoy (2001), Paramilitary imprisonment in Northern Ireland: Resistance, management and release , p.216. Oxford University Press
- ↑ BBC History: The Troubles, 1963 to 1985. p. 7
- ^ Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland: Resistance, Management, and Release: Resistance, Management and Release (Clarendon Studies in Criminology) by Kieran McEvoy ( ISBN 978-0198299073 ), page 217
- ↑ Gardiner report on cain.ulst.ac.uk
- ↑ Northern Ireland Prison Service at niprisonservice.gov.uk. ( Memento from August 9, 2006 in the Internet Archive )