Another round in the legal battle over the appropriate venue for hearing evidence from soldiers who were on duty in Derry on Bloody Sunday will be fought in a London court within two weeks.
The inquiry was told yesterday the Court of Appeal has provisionally fixed Tuesday and Wednesday, December 11th and 12th, for the hearing of an appeal by the Saville Tribunal against the recent High Court decision won by a number of soldiers.
On November 16th the divisional court of the High Court quashed a ruling made by the Saville inquiry last August that the soldiers must give their evidence to the inquiry in the Guildhall in Derry.
A group of 36 soldiers had challenged, by way of judicial review, the inquiry's decision that they should come to Derry to testify. Lawyers for the soldier witnesses argued their oral evidence should be given in London or elsewhere in Britain. The divisional court held that the tribunal had misdirected itself in law as to the test to be applied when assessing the threshold of risk to soldier witnesses from terrorist reprisals.
It said the inquiry had erred in concluding that the soldiers had no reasonable fears for their safety.
The court said that once the risk of death was a serious or real possibility, the inquiry had to find some compelling justification for interference with the soldiers' Article 2 ("Right to Life") rights, rather than requiring the soldiers to provide a compelling justification for giving their evidence elsewhere.
Lawyers for the Bloody Sunday victims' families expressed their clients' bitter disappointment at the divisional court ruling, and accused British courts of interfering in the decision-making of a distinguished international tribunal.
The entire issue now goes to the Court of Appeal in London, and there is the further possibility, whatever the decision of that court, that it could be appealed to the House of Lords.
In spite of the forthcoming appeal, the inquiry hopes to continue hearing the evidence of civilian witnesses in Derry throughout next week and the week after.
Mrs Bridget O'Reilly yesterday told how she looked out her kitchen window in Abbey Park when the shooting started in the Bogside on Bloody Sunday, January 30th, 1972. She had a view of the entrance into Glenfada Park and could see a young man lying partly on the pavement. She found out later that this was Mr Jim Wray, one of the 13 people shot dead that day.