McCANN AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT
JOINT DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGES RYSSDAL, BERNHARDT, THÓR
VILHJÁLMSSON, GÖLCÜKLÜ, PALM, PEKKANEN, SIR JOHN FREELAND, BAKA AND
JAMBREK
63
being fired; and had it not been for Savage’s actions as Soldiers C and D
closed on him, which may have been prompted by the sound of gunfire
from the McCann and Farrell incident, there is every possibility that he, too,
would have been seized and arrested without resort to shooting.
20. The implication at the end of paragraph 211 that the authorities did
not exercise sufficient care in evaluating the information at their disposal
before transmitting it to soldiers "whose use of firearms automatically
involved shooting to kill" appears to be based on no more than "the failure
to make provision for a margin of error" to which the beginning of the
paragraph refers. We have dealt already with the "insufficient allowances
for alternative possibilities" point (see, again, paragraphs 13-16 above),
which we take to be the same as the alleged failure to provide for a margin
of error which is referred to here. Any assessment of the evaluation by the
authorities of the information at their disposal should, in any event, take due
account of their need to reckon throughout with the incompleteness of that
information (see paragraph 8 above); and there are no cogent grounds for
any suggestion that there was information which they ought reasonably to
have known but did not.
21. Paragraph 212, after making a glancing reference to the restrictive
effect of the public interest certificates and saying that it is not clear
"whether the use of firearms to wound their targets may have been
warranted by the specific circumstances that confronted them at the moment
of arrest", goes on to say that "their reflex action in this vital respect lacks
the degree of caution ... to be expected from law-enforcement personnel in a
democratic society, even when dealing with dangerous terrorist suspects,
and stands in marked contrast to the standard of care reflected in the
instructions in the use of firearms by the police". It concludes with the
assertion that this "failure by the authorities also suggests a lack of
appropriate care in the control and organisation of the arrest operation".
22. As regards any suggestion that, if an assessment on the issue had
been required by their training or instruction to be carried out by the
soldiers, shooting to wound might have been considered by them to have
been warranted by the circumstances at the time, it must be recalled that
those circumstances included a genuine belief on their part that the suspects
might be about to detonate a bomb by pressing a button. In that situation, to
shoot merely to wound would have been a highly dangerous course:
wounding alone might well not have immobilised a suspect and might have
left him or her capable of pressing a button if determined to do so.
23. More generally as regards the training given, there was in fact ample
evidence at the inquest to the effect that soldiers (and not only these
soldiers) would be trained to respond to a threat such as that which was
thought to be posed by the suspects in this case - all of them dangerous
terrorists who were believed to be putting many lives at immediate risk - by
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