plastic baton rounds ensures that the risk of injury or death is kept to a minimum. Over the years, a variety of riot control devices have been and continue to be tested. So far, an effective and improved replacement for the plastic baton round has yet to be found. The use of plastic baton rounds has declined dramatically in recent years. During 1988, 3,104 rounds were fired, in the majority of cases during widespread rioting involving danger to life. Although in the past 20 years a total of 17 people have died in incidents apparently involving plastic (or the earlier rubber) rounds, only one such incident (death of Seamus Duffy on 9 August 1989) has taken place since 1986.
Private possession of firearms
75. Following the tragic incident in Hungerford, Berkshire,
on 19 August 1987, when a man named Michael Ryan shot dead 17 persons (including himself) and injured 15 others, the Government introduced
the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988. Previously, people had only to satisfy the police that they had good reason to possess a specific firearm, or that they were proper persons to own a shotgun. The 1988 Act, which came into force in 1989, put exceptionally lethal weapons like the Kalashnikov rifle into the prohibited category (which means that they cannot normally be possessed by private individuals), and introduced stricter controls on the possession and safekeeping of shotguns. The Firearms (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) Order 1989 introduced broadly similar restrictions in Northern Ireland.
Article 7
Prisons
76.
For convenience, this section of the report deals generally with the procedures for making and investigating complaints against members of the prison and police services, although these procedures are not confined to matters which fall within article 7 of the Covenant.
77.
Since the last report, with effect from 1 April 1989, the prison rules which made it a disciplinary offence in England and Wales to:
(a) make any false and malicious allegation against an officer; or (b) repeatedly make groundless complaints, have been abolished. The so-called "simultaneous ventilation rule", which required prisoners to put forward their grievances within the internal complaints system at the same time as any letter of complaint might be written to persons or bodies outside the prison system, also recently been abolished in England and Wales and is being considered as part of a comprehensive review of the prison rules being undertaken in Scotland.
has
78. The practical consequences of these changes in England and Wales are that prisoners may now make formal complaints in writing to the Governor or to headquarters about ill-treatment by any member of the prison staff without facing the risk of disciplinary action; and they may refer their complaint to an outside body (including the police) without at the same time having to make use of the internal complaints system, with the inhibitions that that implied. When a prisoner makes an allegation, he is assured that it will be fully investigated.