Dublin signs terrorism pact

Press, 26 February 1986, Page 10

Dublin signs terrorism pact

NZPA-PA Strasburg The Irish Republic formally signed the European Convention on the suppression of terrorism yesterday in line with a pledge made as part of last year’s Anglo-Irish agreement on Ulster. Dublin’s new Justice Minister, Mr Alan Dukes, who took over the post in a Cabinet reshuffle by the Prime Minister, Dr Garret Fitz Gerald, nearly two weeks ago, added the Irish signature to the document at an official ceremony in Strasburg’s Council of Europe build-

ing. The terms of the convention will not become officially binding on Ireland until late this year when necessary legislation will be introduced in the Dail, the Irish Parliament. Approval is expected, but only after resistance from the main Opposition party, Fianna Fail, which is opposed to extradition procedures that the European document aims at expediting. The convention may have to undergo a test in the Irish Supreme Court, the country’s final legal

authority, before it can be ratified by Ireland. Until then it can be used by lawyers in legal argument in cases concerning attempts to extradite I.R.A. and other terrorist group suspects from the Irish Republic to the United Kingdom. Only Ireland and Malta among the Council of Europe member States had failed to sign the nine-year-old terrorism convention. Constitutional doubts about extradition in claimed “political” cases had prevented Irish participation. But a Supreme Court

decision in Dublin more than three years ago, after which the former Irish National Liberation Army chief of staff, Dominic McGlinchey, was returned to police custody in Northern Ireland, helped remove the Constitutional question-mark. The Court ruled that each case had to be judged on its merits, thus plugging a legal loophole by which dozens of fugitives evaded extradition after saying that their alleged terrorist crimes in Northern Ireland and Britain had been politically motivated.