Legal challenge in Belfast against no-deal Brexit dismissed

PanARMENIAN.Net - UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was dealt a rare piece of good news on Thursday, September 12 when a judge in Belfast dismissed a legal challenge to a no-deal Brexit, rejecting a claim that it undermined the Good Friday Agreement, CNN reports.

Lord Justice Bernard McCloskey made the ruling on a trio of cases, which contended that Johnson's hardline no-deal Brexit strategy would damage the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. That deal, signed in 1998, helped end decades of bloody sectarian violence in which more than 3,000 people died.

The government rejected that argument during two days of legal proceedings in Belfast High Court, PA reported.

One of the applicants was victims' campaigner Raymond McCord. His son was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1997.

"I consider the characterisation of the subject matter of these proceedings as inherently and unmistakably political to be beyond plausible dispute," McCloskey said in his written ruling, PA news agency reported.

"Within the world of politics the well-recognised phenomena of claim and counterclaim, assertion and counter-assertion, allegation and denial, blow and counter-blow, alteration and modification of government policy, public statements, unpublished deliberations, posturing, strategy and tactics are the very essence of what is both countenanced and permitted in a democratic society," he added.