The Independent Commission on Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) was established on 1 December 2023 to implement the UK government’s controversial Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act (‘Legacy Act’) that had became law on 18 September 2023. It is now preparing to begin work in summer 2024. These preparations have included publishing reports with ideas on how it might receive requests for information recovery from bereaved families, conduct its investigations into serious Troubles-related offences, and produce reports. However, it has yet to reveal its thinking about how to approach the most controversial of its functions, namely ‘to determine whether to grant persons immunity from prosecution’ for serious Troubles-related offences.

In this blog, I analyse what the Legacy Act tells us about how this process will operate. Much remains uncertain pending the Northern Ireland Secretary of State and Chief Commissioner developing its rules and guidance as required by the legislation. However, the terms of the Legacy Act make clear that the conditional immunity scheme has only limited potential to yield new information for families and Northern Irish society. These limitations coupled with the reality that the scheme was enacted in the face of widespread opposition within Northern Ireland mean that rather than promoting reconciliation, the scheme runs the risk of entrenching divided narratives of the past and undermining trust in public institutions.

Read the full blog here.

 

Professor Louise Mallinder

Professor Mallinder is the Theme Lead for Legacy at the Mitchell Institute and Professor of Law at the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast. Professor Mallinder's research interests relate to the fields of international human rights law, international criminal law, and law and politics in political transitions.