Multilateralism, human rights and the 1970s: Insights from Ireland’s role in the development of the human rights field

The Ireland v United Kingdom case concerns the treatment of detainees by British security forces in Northern Ireland and the implementation of internment or detention without trial, introduced in Northern Ireland in 1971. By reading human rights ‘as a language’ and ‘an endless semantic battlefield’, we explore how the Irish government in the Ireland v United Kingdom case sought to use the European Convention of Human Rights strategically as a legal outcome before a regional human rights institution to secure its own political assessment of internment and the controversial interrogation methods. We focus on two strategic moves that the Irish legal team pursued at the ‘admissibility’ and ‘merits’ stages of the European Commission of Human Rights proceedings, namely, submitting a wider range of allegations, alongside Article 3 allegations, as an administrative practice, and advocating for the hearing of expert testimony on the use of the interrogation methods (the ‘five techniques’). We explore these strategic moves in order to illustrate the semantic battlefield in operation and understand the potential limits of the strategic use of human rights as a language.