Legal challenge over Holy Cross may go to Europe

A legal challenge against how police handled the loyalist protest which targeted Catholic schoolgirls at Holy Cross Girls' School in north Belfast could end up in the European Courts, it was revealed today.

The House of Lords today dismissed the case, which criticised policing of violent loyalist demonstrations at the school in 2001.

But after the Lords judgments recorded how pupils suffered weeks of sectarian abuse and were targeted by missiles including balloons filled with urine, solicitors said they might yet take their case to the European Court of Human Rights.

The scenes at Holy Cross attracted international media attention after simmering sectarian tensions boiled over and a Protestant community sought to block the route of Catholic pupils and parents making their way to school.

At the height of the protest a loyalist bomb was exploded at the scene and, after calls for the demonstration to be cleared from the area, the mother of a pupil later launched a legal action criticising the police operation.

Fearghal Shiels, of Madden & Finucane Solicitors, which handled the case, said: “We are very disappointed by the decision and are giving serious consideration to an application to the European Court of Human Rights.

“It is difficult to reconcile the fact that the House clearly accepted that the children were subject to inhuman and degrading treatment, yet concluded that permitting a protest to take place, which the police admitted was illegal, was upholding the rule of law.”

The High Court and the Court of Appeal had already rejected the case and Baroness Hale of Richmond was among the Law Lords who dismissed it today.

But the Baroness said of the Holy Cross episode: “The world looked on in consternation and amazement in September 2001 as day after day little girls being taken to school by their parents were subjected to a barrage of intimidating clamour, insults, abuse and offensive missiles from bystanders, some of them children themselves, as they walked up the street.”

The scenes caused widespread outrage as schoolchildren walked along a corridor of police and soldiers in riot gear.

But despite the fact that loyalists were only yards from the children, police claimed that, if they took action to force loyalists away, they risked sparking more serious violence across Belfast.

The Baroness added: “It was the fact that little children could be subjected to such prolonged and very public ill-treatment which horrified the outside world and made it hard for them to understand, not only why the aggressors could think it in any way acceptable to subject the children to such an ordeal, but also why the authorities could allow it to happen.”

But she said it had been demonstrated that had the police taken a firmer line “it could have been a great deal worse”.

She added: “Hindsight is a wonderful thing and no doubt the police have learned lessons from this whole experience. But in a highly charged community dispute such as this, it is all too easy to find fault with what the authorities have done, when the real responsibility lies elsewhere.”

The dispute centred on alleged attacks on Glenbryn homes by the larger nationalist community in Ardoyne and was eventually resolved when the Protestant residents were promised social services and security measures.