Verdict on Bloody Sunday a year away
By Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor
21/01/2007
The Bloody Sunday Inquiry will not publish its report for another year, officials said yesterday.
Lord Saville is likely to take three years longer than originally expected to complete his report into the shootings by British troops in 1972, taking the inquiry into its second decade. He blames the “sheer volume of material”.
The inquiry heard oral evidence from 922 people and must consider written statements from about 1,500 more.
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The total cost is officially put at £172 million, of which more than £80 million was paid to lawyers. The longer it takes to complete the report, the more expensive it will be.
There are up to a dozen staff working with Lord Saville at a secure location in London as he types drafts on to his computer.
Jan 30 will be the 35th anniversary of the events in Londonderry that left 13 people dead and 14 injured on the streets of a British city after a civil rights march. Another man later died of his injuries.
The first inquiry, conducted by Lord Widgery, published its report within 11 weeks.
In January 1998, Tony Blair announced an “urgent” new inquiry and Lord Saville, a recently-appointed law lord with what looked like a promising career ahead of him in Britain’s highest court, agreed to take it on.
He finished taking evidence from all but a handful of witnesses in February 2004 and heard closing speeches in November of that year. He made it clear at the time that he planned to submit his report to the Government in the summer of 2005.
But the report is still being written and it is not likely to be ready before 2008.
A statement on his inquiry’s website says that “it is extremely difficult to predict how long the outstanding work will take”, while adding that Lord Saville and the two retired Commonwealth judges sitting with him “consider it most unlikely that they will complete the report before the end of 2007 at the earliest, and they may need a longer time even than that”.
The families of those who were killed on Bloody Sunday are understood to be content with the delay, anxious that Lord Saville should have all the time he needs to compile a definitive report.
Officials denied any suggestion that he was finding it difficult to cope with the volume of material, explaining that he was “very thorough” in sifting the evidence.
Lord Saville has rejected pleas from lawyers for the soldiers involved not to make a finding implying criminal conduct on behalf of an individual unless the allegation could be proved beyond reasonable doubt and to avoid any finding of serious misconduct falling short of criminality without evidence stronger than the mere balance of probabilities,
As the former soldiers continue to wait for a ruling on a chapter of their lives most of them will have closed many years ago, the only comfort for them was that Lord Saville promised not to entertain allegations that “have no sensible foundation at all”.
