ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the situation prevailing in Northern Ireland from its birth as a separate political entity and a constituent state of the United Kingdom (1921) to the end of World War II (1945). It examines the increasing role of human rights in Northern Ireland's sociopolitical context from the end of World War II until the early 1960s. The right to self-determination was first articulated in different ways by President Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points and also by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. The Special Powers Act of 1922 was initially renewed annually but it became permanent in 1933. Apart from enacting the Special Powers Act, early Northern Irish Parliaments and administrations also dealt with another matter that would be at the core of the nationalist grievances that erupted in the 1960s: electoral systems and processes.
