The essence of the appellant’s case is that the state and its emanation, the police force, failed to take appropriate steps to discharge their positive obligation under art. 3 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“the Convention”) to protect the appellant and her young daughter against the infliction upon them of inhuman and degrading treatment. It was also claimed that the police had discriminated against them in their handling of the events in which such treatment occurred.

At the material time, the appellant’s daughter went to a Catholic primary school (Holy Cross) in Ardoyne Road in a largely Catholic district.  The appellant and her daughter walked to school.  A housing estate which was inhabited by Protestant families bordered Ardoyne Road.   

Serious disorder broke out on Ardoyne Road on 19 June 2001.  This developed into abuse towards and attacks on children returning from school and their parents.  This situation continued for the rest of that school term and then again into the new school session.  At one point, an explosive device was thrown into the road.  During that time, in order to enable the children to get to school without physical harm, they walked in a group between lines of armoured vehicles and police or service personnel holding riot shields.  The situation ended in November 2001. 

The appellant does not claim that she and her daughter were directly subjected to abuse or attacks, but she states that her daughter was frightened and upset by witnessing a violent incident which took place.

The police saw the events as part of a complex community dispute, in which a loyalist enclave on this area of North Belfast saw itself as under threat from the encroaching nationalists, and was exercising a right to ‘protest’ about this. The police later accepted that this was not a legitimate exercise of the right to protest. However, at the time they believed that more sinister forces on the loyalist side might exploit the dispute to foment much more serious violence elsewhere in Belfast if the matter was not carefully handled and ultimately a political solution found.

The essential dispute before the House was whether the police were entitled to take into account the risk of serious harm and even death to unspecified people elsewhere in Belfast when deciding how to protect the Holy Cross school children.

Both the trial judge and the Court of Appeal thought that the police were entitled to take those wider considerations into account.

The House of Lords held that, as a general principle, a police officer is not entitled to stand by and let one person kill or seriously ill-treat another, when he has the means of preventing it, just because he fears the wider consequences of doing so.  In this case, however, the House held that it had not been shown that, had the police behaved at the outset in the way in which it is now said that they should have behaved, the children’s experience would have been any better. Indeed, it could have been a great deal worse. They were in very real physical danger at the beginning.  The difficulties and dangers to them in doing what it is now suggested should have been done could not be ignored.

For that reason, the House unanimously dismissed the appeal.