Women Tortured in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries Looked to the UN for Justice. They’re Still Looking.

In October, the United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a final decision in Elizabeth Coppin v. Ireland that once again dashed hopes of justice for survivors of one of Ireland’s worst regimes of torture and abuse. The committee, under its mandate to examine individual allegations of torture and ill-treatment around the world, ruled that Ireland did not violate the Convention Against Torture — despite repeatedly calling the Irish government’s investigation into torture in the Laundries over the years inadequate. By ignoring their own jurisprudence, the committee is setting a dangerous precedent for standards of future investigations into violence against women and girls.

In 1951, the Listowel District Court found Elizabeth Coppin to be destitute and illegitimate, meaning she was born to a single mother who could not afford to raise her. They then committed her to an industrial girl’s school, a system which has also been investigated for abuse and neglect, which later sent her to Saint Vincent’s Magdalene Laundry in 1964. The Laundries were religious institutions where at least 10,000 women and girls — many of whom were perceived to be “promiscuous” as unmarried mothers (or their daughters) or as burdens to their families or the state — were confined and forced to work unpaid, laundering and sewing for local businesses or government departments. Coppin was transferred to two other Laundries before being discharged in 1968 at the age of 19.

Inside, Coppin was forced into labor without pay for six days a week, subject to multiple forms of physical and psychological abuse, and deprived of adequate food and shelter, among other abuses. Coppin believed she would die in a Laundry and be buried in a mass grave, the fate of an estimated 1,663 other women and girls.

The last remaining Laundry closed in 1996, three years after the discovery of one such grave in their own yard exposed the horrors that had happened there.

Ireland first came under review of the Committee Against Torture in 2011, and in its concluding observations, the committee expressed “grave concern” at Ireland’s failure to conduct a prompt, independent, and thorough investigation into the Laundries. In response, Ireland established an Inter-Departmental Committee (IDC), which found in its report that a “large majority” of the women and girls in Laundries neither experienced nor witnessed abuse — contrary to the survivor testimonies recounted in the same report on living and working conditions.

The IDC report also characterized the deprivation of food, forced isolation, and having a soiled sheet pinned to one survivor’s back as “non-physical punishments,” even though they were physical acts.

In 2013, the committee’s rapporteur Felice D. Gaer described the IDC as lacking “many elements of a prompt, independent and thorough investigation” and emphasized that Ireland was presented with extensive survivor testimony of physical and psychological abuse. The committee reiterated this sentiment in its concluding observations of Ireland’s second review in 2017, calling for another investigation. And, in 2019, the committee’s rapporteur Michael Gaffey followed up yet again, stating that a “thorough, independent and impartial investigation regarding the Magdalen[e] Laundries” still had not been conducted.

Elizabeth Coppin submitted her case to the committee in July 2018, at 69, and received a preliminary judgment in January 2020, which recognized that Ireland had “repeatedly declined to open an investigation” in line with their obligations under the Convention Against Torture. The committee decided that Coppin’s case was admissible for consideration for reasons including the lack of an independent investigation.

Ireland was given the opportunity to provide additional information on the issues raised by the committee but could not produce any action on the Laundries other than a public apology from the President of Ireland in 2018. No investigation into Coppin’s allegations, nor into the Laundries in general, has been conducted since 2013.

Despite this history of condemnation from the committee, and subsequent inaction on the part of the Irish government, the committee’s final decision in October 2022 did an about-face by accepting Ireland’s argument that it “[conducted] an effective, objective and timely investigation.” The committee issued its final ruling in favor of Ireland, and another path to justice was closed off to Coppin and countless other victims.

The current committee has no members who were present for Ireland’s initial review in 2011, and of the three who were on the committee in 2017, two dissented from its final decision issued in 2022. This change in composition may explain the dramatic change in jurisprudence.

The committee’s decision could set a precedent that lowers the standard of what qualifies as a prompt, impartial, and thorough investigation. Ireland’s IDC was called out by the committee in 2013 for ignoring extensive survivor testimony and concluding that very little abuse took place in the Laundries. International legal scholars make it clear that investigations that proceed from “the assumption that no such acts have occurred… or [the] desire to protect the suspected individuals” are indicative of a biased process.

The obligation to sufficiently investigate human rights abuses is always met with resistance, specifically in cases of gender-based crimes, which are already underreported and highly stigmatized. These processes can also be impacted by an investigator’s gendered stereotypes and contribute to a “culture of discrimination” that only perpetuates violence. The committee recognized these issues in concluding observations and complaint decisions and, therefore, must understand that the acceptance of a substandard investigation for crimes committed solely against women and girls sets a dangerous precedent.

In his public apology to victims of the Laundries, the president of Ireland said that “stigma, shame, and an unreceptive society condemned so many women to concealing their experiences.” He may as well have been talking about his government’s own investigation. And by accepting the Irish government’s diminishment of the trauma inflicted on an estimated 10,000 women and girls, the Committee Against Torture sent an alarming message to future victims of gender-based violence that they will be denied justice by their own governments.