When Annie Kelly died in a strip cell in the punishment block of the Moume House Women's Unit at Northern Ireland's high-security Maghaberry Prison, many people with whom she had contact during her short life expressed sorrow fused with frustration.
Taking Foucault’s construction of ‘regimes of truth’ in advanced democratic societies as its starting point, this article reflects on three decades of formal investigation and public inquiry in the North of Ireland.
The processes by which human rights violations are addressed involves a variety of official and unofficial mechanisms. Some mechanisms are political, some community-based, some are legal, and some combine all three aspects and a number of legal models that have emerged.