Last week, a few pages of an apparent 90 page report by Sir William Shawcross, appointed in 2019 to inform HMG’s approach on facilitating reparations for UK victims of Libya-sponsored IRA terrorism, were disclosed. (This had its origins in a private legal claim of our clients — UK victims of Libya-PIRA). If HMG calculated their gesture would be well received by the victims, they were wrong. It was met with anger.
On the face of it, the disclosure appears to be a gesture of goodwill to the UK victims. Yet the value is perhaps diluted by its suddenness (the FCDO told them an hour beforehand) which coincided with the release of other Libya-PIRA Semtex news, that “Officials blocked Martin McGuinness questioning” over the Enniskillen bombing (a Libya-PIRA Semtex bomb and part of our legal campaign). As one’s eyes roll at any mawkish nursery games, perhaps the demonstrable lack of judgement is worse — inherently, limited disclosure can far from satisfy the UK victims because it naturally raises more questions than it could ever answer.
It is hard to know where to begin describing the Orwellian nightmare poor Shawcross faced. The revelations show HMG’s condescending approach to the process and victims. It revealed they ignored Shawcross’s recommendation to utilise generated revenues on frozen Libyan money in the UK (which the victims had called for since 2012), and the factual and legal obfuscations and misunderstandings of successive governments. But of deeper concern — if letting down (indeed, betraying) UK terror victims is not enough — is that far beyond simply demonstrating institutionalised ineptitude, it depicts the broken, disruptive, and fragmented nature of British institutions and democratic government. For over 20 years, governmental institutions have not only not helped these UK victims but have frustrated their legal campaign to secure just reparations from Libya. The institutions appear to have forgotten that they exist to serve the UK people.
Institutional shame alone should see our officials on a plane tomorrow to Libya to leverage the cards they hold
The limited disclosure does not do justice to the story of the UK victims it concerns. A small number of pioneering victims and their families brought a legal case against Libya in 2006. The case was stayed in 2008 by US executive order, after President Bush leveraged a deal for US victims of Gaddafi (HMG chose not to do likewise). As part of that deal, three US nationals in our case got compensation; every UK victim in our case received nothing (HMG knew this would be the result before we did).
We continued the legal action campaign for equal treatment. In 2011, I met with the new revolutionary government in Libya, they signed the Benghazi Agreement, admitting liability and agreeing to pay parity reparations to our UK victim clients. Since then, Libya has not honoured the agreement. In 2015, after a public outcry, the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (NIAC) carried out a review and in May 2017, recommended that HMG should: (i) assist by negotiating directly with Libya to enforce the reparations payment to these few victims; (ii) establish and fund its own reparation scheme if no progress was made by the end of 2017; and (iii) leverage the c.£13bn in frozen Libyan assets (including generated revenues/accrued interest) for these purposes. Successive governments ignored those recommendations.
After parliamentary outrage, Shawcross was retained by HMG to find a solution through the quagmire made by successive government departments sticking their heads into the mud. However, HMG then decided his report would not be made public and the UK victims never got to see it.
Aesop’s fable tells of the hubris of a fox with no tail who endeavours to convince all other impressionable foxes to lop off their tails so they can all be the same. In this instance, the crafty yet fallible fox is the whole institutional framework behind Northern Ireland’s Legacy. It is as plain from the few pages that have been disclosed that the UK victims’ quest for reparations was not ultimately frustrated by the law, Libya, nor the PIRA but by UK institutions. The report’s conclusions are littered with negative institutional rhetoric; rehearsed reasons and justifications for doing nothing to assist these few UK victims.
The irony cannot be lost on anyone; it clearly indicates that NI Legacy apparatchiks were against the idea of our clients obtaining justice; if justice could not be for all (regardless of who had or did not have legal right to these reparations, or who had or had not campaigned for it since 2006), then forget justice for just a few. The telling line was that compensation “to individual and specific victims is considered by those on the front line to be undesirable”. Institutions are broken if they cannot serve both individuals and the whole at the same time, indeed standing up for the few, protects and advances the interests of us all.
The real irony is that way back before the Libyan revolution of 2011, Gordon Brown’s government tipped us off about these issues so that we might address them as best we could. That led me on a US tour, meeting US supporters of Irish republicanism. They were generally more than satisfied with our intentions and bona fides in promising to push the envelope in negotiations to also try to secure a cross-community fund for Northern Ireland peace and reconciliation. Those sensible republican folk in the US recognised the necessarily narrow legal ambit of the UK victims’ legal action and welcomed our efforts to try to meet their “legacy” concerns. Hence the Benghazi Agreement (which I obtained in a war torn Libya with no help from HMG), also references the Libyans paying for a NI peace and reconciliation fund which in later years we valued at $1.5 billion and argued should similarly be paid out of the ample Libyan frozen assets in the UK (presumedly the apparatchiks would not be against that as they have abstractly failed to inject anything close to that amount to boost NI reconciliation).
The Legacy apparatchiks that inhabit the shadows of the Shawcross Report, reveal a foxy unrealism (even the PIRA has never suggested it is undesirable for the victims of its terror to get compensation). Their position is simple: if all cross-community victims of the troubles cannot get compensation from Libya, then no one should. This approach ignores the law; it fails to recognise that the few in this instance have a legal right to compensation under domestic and international law from Libya, whereas the “all” in this instance do not have the legitimate legal claim to back their, however solid, moral claim. They don’t even see the opportunity staring at them, to hail the few and harness their Benghazi Agreement to get $1.5 billion for cross community reconciliation. What a mean spirited, feckless, and tailless red fox they are; spineless too as we have no clue who these nameless apparatchiks are.
And that reminds me of another disrupting bureaucrat. Putin designated me and others as “British establishment nazis” simply for challenging his autocracy’s heinous behaviour in Ukraine. Those that know me laugh at both the “Nazi” and “establishment” claims; I’m as much a pain in the ass to both as I try to be to Putin. Yet there is a darker poignance to Putin’s description: while the UK state is far from being Nazi, the plight of the UK victims and the hubris with which the institutions have treated them shows the markers of an autocratic establishment. UK victims are treated like Stalin’s victims, forever underserved, told the state knows better, kept in the dark, and misled. “It’s time to draw a line” under their campaign, to quote the Shawcross Report, I say it’s time to draw a line under arrogant, undemocratic and unhelpful governments. Governments must remember who voted for them and who they serve; they cannot simply disenfranchise UK victims because their objectives are inconvenient to its own day-to-day (often chaotic and dysfunctional) running of the state.
Thanks to the disclosure, it is now clear — as has always been presumed — that not only have UK institutions failed the UK victims, but they have actively disrupted their private justice efforts. There is a legal term familiar to such behaviour: tortious wrongful interference. The Prime Minister has a chance to reject the Legacy apparatchiks’ foxy desire for him to follow suit and lop off his own tail to conform to their own image, agenda, and convictions. Institutional shame alone should see our officials on a plane tomorrow to Libya to leverage the cards they hold: international law; the Benghazi Agreement; the precedent of other allied states that grabbed compensation from Libya for their own victims; and £13 billion in sanctioned Libyan assets in the UK (and the precedent of HMG’s/EU’s recent use of Russian sanctioned assets in their jurisdictions to provide funds to victims in Ukraine — what is good for the Russian goose is good for the Libyan gander). Only a foolish fox could hold all those trump cards and yet lose the hand. If the current government fails to play or win the hand then it too is broken, needs fixing, or needs to change.
