Robert Lowry, Baron Lowry

Robert Lynd Erskine Lowry, Baron Lowry,

He has since held the title of honorary colonel for

• 38th Irish Infantry Brigade
  - 5th Battalion and 7th Battalion
• Royal Irish Rangers- 5th (Volunteer) Battalion^[1]

Law

He was admitted to the Bar of Northern Ireland in 1947. He was a High Court Judge in Northern Ireland from 1964 until he became Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland in 1971, when he was also made a Northern Ireland Privy Counsellor.

In 1973, after the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act came into effect and "provided that a confession was admissible in evidence in a criminal trial unless it had been obtained by violence, torture, or inhuman treatment", Lowry held that the trial judge still retained a discretion under common law to exclude the confession if its admission would not be in the interests of justice.^[4]

Lowry did not exclude self-incriminating evidence alone as insufficient to convict upon, and in R v. Gorman^[6] he found that the Northern Ireland Act 1972 s. 1, by retrospectively validating the conferment of powers of arrest under the regulations, rendered lawful the otherwise unlawful arrest and subsequent detention of Gorman. Lowry was unable to implement Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), as it was not incorporated into UK law until the Human Rights Act 1998.

In 1975, Lowry was appointed by Merlyn Rees to chair the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention, an unsuccessful attempt to replace the collapsed Sunningdale Agreement.

In 1977, John Hume challenged a regulation under the 1922 Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland), which allowed any soldier to disperse an assembly of three or more people. Lowry held the regulation was ultra vires under Section 4 of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 which forbade the Parliament of Northern Ireland from making laws in respect to the British Army.^[4]

Lowry had been knighted in 1971,^[2] and was created a life peer as Baron Lowry, of Crossgar in the County of Down, on 18 July 1979, in the early months of the first prime ministership of Margaret Thatcher.^[1][3]

In 1980, Lowry partly excused the actions of two members of the

He was an honorary Bencher of the King's Inns, Dublin, and of the Middle Temple.

Personal life

Lord Lowry married twice:

• Mary Martin (d. 1987), in 1948, with whom he had three daughters (Sheila, Anne and Margaret).
• Barbara Calvert, Lady Lowry QC, in 1994 (daughter of Albert Parker CBE). She died in 2015.^[10]

See also

• List of Northern Ireland Members of the House of Lords

References