Roger Casement  

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Roger David Casement (Template:Lang-ga; 1 September 1864 – 3 August 1916), known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist. He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat and later became a humanitarian activist, poet and Easter Rising leader. Described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations", he was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in Peru.

In Africa as a young man, Casement first worked for commercial interests before joining the British Colonial Service. In 1891 he was appointed as a British consul, a profession he followed for more than 20 years. Influenced by the Boer War and his investigation into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples, Casement grew to mistrust imperialism. After retiring from consular service in 1913, he became more involved with Irish republicanism and other separatist movements. During World War I he made efforts to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising that sought to gain Irish independence.

He was arrested, convicted and executed for high treason. He was stripped of his knighthood and other honours. Before the trial, the British government circulated excerpts said to be from his private journals, known as the Black Diaries, which detailed homosexual activities. Given prevailing views and existing laws on homosexuality, this material undermined support for clemency for Casement. Debates have continued about these diaries: a handwriting comparison study in 2002 concluded Casement had written the diaries, but this was still contested by some.

The Black Diaries and Casement’s sexuality

Prior to his execution, photographs of a diary which the Crown claimed belonged to Casement were circulated to those urging commutation of his death sentence. These documents, supplied to King George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and others in Britain, Ireland and the United States, showed Casement to have been a promiscuous homosexual with a fondness for very young men, a crime at the time. In a time of strong social conservatism, not least among Irish Catholics, the "Black Diaries" undermined or at least stifled support for Casement. They also led some of Casement's opponents to suggest that details about colonial sexual atrocities in his reports were based on his personal fantasies, though this was not supported by evidence. The diaries may now be inspected at the British National Archives in Kew.

Though some believed that the diaries were forgeries, much as Charles Stewart Parnell had been the target of the Pigott forgeries implicating him in the Phoenix Park Murders, others did not. H. Montgomery Hyde, the Unionist MP and barrister who wrote a book on Casement's trial, had no doubt that Casement had been a pederast.

In an effort to settle the issue, an independent forensic examination of the diaries, funded by RTÉ and the BBC, was recently undertaken by Dr. Audrey Giles, an internationally respected figure in the field of document forensics. In comparing Casement's "White Diaries" (ordinary diaries of the time) with the "Black Diaries", which allegedly date from the same time-span, the study concluded, on the basis of detailed handwriting analysis, that the Black Diaries were genuine and had been written by Casement.

This study, commissioned by a team of academics from Goldsmiths, University of London, was submitted to the forensic expert James Horan for peer review. Horan rejected the report. His main criticism was that there was no evidence that the comparative material used was the handwriting of Roger Casement. He noted that it was this problem which lead to the mistaken authentication of the Hitler diaries. The comparative material given to Dr Giles by the team from Goldsmiths was taken from the Morel Archive at the London School of Economics. All of it passed through the hands of British Intelligence after Morel's arrest in 1917.

The case for forgery of the Black Diaries has always been predicated on the fact that Casement was a uniquely admired and respected public figure in Britain among the 1916 leaders. It has also been claimed that the extremely active homosexual sex life described in the diaries is unlikely to be genuine, but it has been argued that this would not refute the authenticity of the diaries, as they may have been sexual fantasies.

See also

• The Putumayo, the Devil's Paradise: Travels in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account of the Atrocities Committed upon the Indians Therein.