“Non-Recognition of the Law Does Not Invalidate It”: The Status of BLA and Provisional IRA Prisoners

Mutulu Shakur and other incarcerated Black revolutionaries have insisted that the United States government has an obligation under international law to treat them as prisoners of war. This position particularly applies to captured militants of the New Afrikan independence movement. In this context the U.S. has responded that PoW status does not apply to those engaged in wars of national liberation. This essay challenges that assertion with a close look at how the British treated captured members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. It begins by introducing Shakur’s claims to PoW status and the relevant provisions of the Geneva Conventions. After briefly summarizing centuries of Irish resistance to British colonization, it provides a detailed look at “the Troubles,” a period beginning in the late 1960s, when armed opposition to the occupation of Northern Ireland intensified and was met by British campaigns of “pacification.” In this period Irish prisoners—like their counterparts in the Black liberation movement—insisted on being treated as prisoners of war. As a result, the British authorities placed IRA prisoners in a “Special Category” that, for all practical purposes, amounted to PoW status under international law. Thus, the essay concludes, British policies with respect to the IRA undermine the United States’ contemporaneous claims that there was no precedent for treating Mutulu Shakur as a prisoner of war.