Marian Price could not attend her latest court hearing because she is too ill. Her lawyer said, that she is unable to give instructions to her legal team, with her physical and mental health continuing to deteriorate. Her lawyer raised concerns about Marian being examined by anymore experts from the prosecution and defence, claiming she has been examined by 16 doctors already. Marian’s case was adjourned for another four weeks of internment without trial. Marian will have been politically interned for 19 months, camouflaged as remand, for what are in essence farcical hearings.
The dehumanization of internees such as Marian Price, through the infliction of pain and torture, has not only damaged her body and mind, it is as Elaine Scarry wrote, world-destroying, "It is the intense pain that destroys a person‘s self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe. Intense pain is also language destroying; as the content of one‘s world disintegrates, so the content of one‘s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject. Thus, physical erasure also eliminates the intelligible voice, reducing human speech to the primordial expression of pain, a state anterior to language."
In addition to these erasures of the body, mind and self, British torture achieves a third form of physical erasure, by the very fact
of the political prisoners‘ torture, requiring concealment. The retreat of torture from respectability by international standards, means that the British must perform it in hiding, primarily with censorship. However they also conceal their involvement in rendition, as they hide their activity in subcontracted assassination, with more curtains over their already, shrouded victim's bodies.
While their prolonged stress positions, as well as other conduct constituting cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment may not always rise to the level of torture, they nevertheless were found guilty of such, by the International Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg regarding their activity in Ireland. The physical erasure of British torture is self-evident, and therefore needs only brief comment.
In secret courts, with identity blacked out on their transcripts, judges will not countenance torture complaints, they will have none of this conduct, deeming it unacceptable and defendants will receive a final warning, oblivious to international law. In such courts they do not want to hear the words, such international law again. The British are not concerned about international law, they will insist on it, by having someone like Marian Price removed from the hearings, so that their secret services and military can consider classified evidence against her in secret.
If we accept the integrity of human rights law and its independence from any state sovereign, then it follows that there can never belawlessness such as there is in British Occupied Ireland, only gross violations of human rights law.British habeas-corpus-stripping provisions, are a core breach of human rights law, besides the many liberty concerns with regard to the Geneva Conventions. British attempts at unilateral re-interpretation of sections international law, have no constitutional rights whatsoever
British Occupied Ireland with the treatment of political internees such as Marian Price, Martin Corey and many others, has become a human-rights-free zone.The quarantine of many Irish political prisoners is a familiar concealment. When placed in a human rights context. British Occupied Ireland is often described in terms of the British government‘s denial of rights to political prisoners but equally important the denial of their Irish humanity.
British Occupied Ireland has been a laboratory, of their dehumanization, while they use their media, such as the BBC world srvice, to refer to prisoners of conscience, as terrorists, to ostracize them from what it means to be human and allow the British the physical and mental treatment of Irish political prisoners, abhorrent to human beings.Thus they accomplish through cultural erasure, through the creation of the terrorist narrative; legal erasure and physical erasure through torture.
While the dimensions of dehumanization are distinct, they are interrelated. All are connected by law and specifically by human rights.The British have created the preconditions for state power activity, so brutal, as to deprive Irish political prisoners of the ability to be human or have any human rights.They stand exposed to the violence of the British state, unmediated, unprotected by any human rights, reducing political internees to a state of bare life without humanity. What is evolving is the Irish have no right, to have rights, a vacuum enabling extreme British state violence, placing the internment of Marian Price, at the center of a struggle not just for rights, but for humanity that includes you and me.
Through resistance, political space will open but the mere resistance, the assertion of self against state violence, is self and life-affirming. Resistance is a way of staying human. This, then, is the work that rights do, when pushed to the brink of annihilation, they provide us with a rudimentary and perhaps inadequate tool to maintain our humanity. Thus by paying particular attention to the value of human rights and arguing the importance of rights, it becomes a mode of resistance, to state violence.
Irish political prisoners themselves, have a long track record of participating in direct forms of resistance in many forms, including dirt strikes and hunger strikes, as a form of prisoner resistance, with lawyer rights-based litigation and the hunger strikes, sharing an understanding of the relationship between rights, violence, and humanity. While sometimes the resistance of lawyers and of prisoners may not be enough to win the prisoners‘ freedom, it is still essential when British state violence is so extreme, as to attempt to extinguish our humanity.
Victimized
Demoralized
Brutalized
Dehumanized
Before the sickening images can take a political toll
The right-wing spin machine plays damage control
Marian Price is just one of several Irish people currently politically interned in British Occupied Ireland during which time lawyers have not been allowed to see any of Britain's ‘alleged’ evidence.
• She has been kept in solitary confinement in a ‘male’ high security prison
• She is effectively interned without a trial, sentence, or release date.
• She has not been given any timescale for any investigation.
• She has not been allowed to see the evidence that the state claims to have
• Her release has been ordered on two occasions by judges. However, on both occasions the British Vice royal has overruled those decisions.
• The Vice royal claims they ‘revoked Marian’s license, ’despite Marian never being released on license. She was given a Royal Pardon.
• Marian’s Royal Pardon has ‘gone missing’ from the home office (the only time in history). The British Vice royal has taken the view that unless a paper copy can be located – it must be assumed that she does not have one. It is generally agreed that MI5 shredded her majesty's pardon.
• Despite no ‘license’ existing for her release from prison in 1980, it is the non-existent licence that is being used to keep her in prison.
• She can only be released by Theresa Villiers the current Vice royal responsible for Marian's internment.
Recently the charges against Marian were thrown out of court because of a lack of evidence. Now the very same charges have been re-instated against Marian again before the same Judge.
In secret courts, being introduced by the back door, through legislation in the House of Lords, MI5 the British secret services are pushing for secret trials, with secret evidence by secret witnesses, that the defendant's appointed lawyer is not allowed to know, see or refute. The length of sentence is also kept secret, under penalty of a long jail sentence by Britain's Official Secret's Act. This trial of Marian Price is believed to have already happened in secret, with the public hearings and showtrial being simply a public rubber stamp, for the injustice against Marian Price in of British Occupied Ireland.
Four male prison officers tie you so tightly can't struggle. You clench your teeth to try to keep your mouth closed but they push a metal spring device around your jaw to prise it open. They force a wooden clamp with a hole in the middle into your mouth. Then, they insert a big rubber tube down that. They hold your head back. You can't move. They throw whatever they like into the food mixer – orange juice, soup, or cartons of cream if they want to beef up the calories. They take jugs of this gruel from the food mixer and pour it into a funnel attached to the tube. The force-feeding takes 15 minutes but it feels like forever. You're in control of nothing. You're terrified the food will go down the wrong way and you won't be able to let them know because you can't speak or move. You're frightened you'll choke to death.
This ordeal lasted six months for the political prisoner of conscience Marian Price
The British government is using the 11 September attacks and the ‘war on terror,’ as an excuse for draconian repressive measures, which politically interns Irish citizens. There is no requirement on the part of the British, to disclose evidence with their odious activity. Since internment breaches the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the British government claims there is a ‘national emergency,’ despite a peace process, as an excuse for opting out of that part of the ECHR. Using this, the British government, continues to intern Irish citizens, simply on bigoted or sectarian perceptions of paranoia and suspicion.
Gareth Pierce, a lawyer who successfully campaigned for the release of the Guilford 4 after 10 years of campaigning has commented, that the bureaucrat "is giving himself/herself the powers of a dictator". Detentions without trial and house arrest, have often been used by brutal dictatorships, who learned their techniques from their former British colonialistmasters.This internment in British Occupied Ireland is a thin end of a wedge. At some stage, anti-irish measures, will also be extended to Britain itself, to includes political activists, trade unionists, etc.
There has been considerable opposition to internment, from within the British legal profession, with Ian MacDonald QC, who was-appointed to a panel of lawyers, to represent suspects in secret courts, resigning, saying; "My role has been altered to provide a false legitimacy to indefinite detention, without knowledge of the accusations being made and without any kind of criminal charge or trial. Such a law is an odious blot on our legal landscape and for reasons of conscience I feel that I must resign".
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, commenting on the publicly apology of a British Minister, to those wrongly convicted of Guildford pub bombings, stated; "On the day when the prime minister apologises for past miscarriages of justice, his government is paving the way for many future injustices. The proposals are the latest in a long line of assaults on the right to a fair trial". These are often used to harass trades unionists and ordinary Irish people. Civil liberties have been eroded to such an extent in the British police state with internment without trial, non-jury ‘Diplock’ courts, and interrogation methods of the British, that civil rights no longer really exist.
Changes in the law, in relation to the British Occupation in Ireland, are then absorbed into general British law, with the right to silence, emasculated to extend into all domestic law in the UK. All of these measures being used against Marian Price and the Irish today, represent a threat to trade unionists, socialists and anyone who may protest against government and big business. What is used against the Irish today, is used by the British government, against others tomorrow. As the Tory government attacks living standards, jobs, services, workers, it is also bringing in laws tested on the Irish, that will be used to repress resistance to those Tory attacks on ordinary people's living standards.
The argument that internment is odious or human rights do not apply, because of a ‘state of emergency’ since 11 September 2001, is a very handy one for a Tory government, who wants to suppress all political opposition, particularly workers’ struggles. We need to stick together with principles before personalities, to argue against the British government’s use of the fear and the terrorist narrative, to push through these secret courts and totalitarian measures. Socialists, trade unionists, in tandem, with the Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English people of no property, along with civil rights campaigners, need to continue to fight all these repressive laws together, while resisting agents of division.
The political internment of Marian Price, is a clear a breach of Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights and of Article 5 of the Convention. The Convention protects the individual from being subject to torture including inhuman and degrading treatment Article 3 and also the right to liberty and security of the person Article 5. Those in detention are also protected by the United Nations Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and by common law doctrines and the rules of natural justice, as developed by the domestic courts
The basis of Marian Price's release from prison in 1980, was a Royal Prerogative of Mercy.In the absence of the documents concerned, a decision cannot be made either by the by the British Vice-royal or the Parole Commissioners, regarding the grounds for her detention, especially when she was originally granted bail by the courts.
No legal authority can take a decision based on the contents of a document it has not seen or make inference, concerning the apparent contents of a documen,t the prosecutors mislaid or destroyed.
In cases such as Marian Price, where secret evidence is being relied upon by the British Vice-royal or supposed anonymous parole commissioners, without any safeguards in place, for the protection from abuse of the political internee, there is in this instance, a clear case of political internment without a fair or transparent trial.
The point of abuse of process, is long past, in the instance of Marian Price and the European Courts are the only peaceful route to justice in this matter of British abuse of Human Rights.
All Irish citizens and British commoners of the UK are afforded the protection of the European Convention on Human Rights as given partial effect in domestic law under the Human Rights Act 1998. This includes the human rights of political internees in British Occupied Ireland
