Casement's crimes had been carried out in Germany and the Treason Act 1351 seemed to apply only to activities carried out on English (or arguably British) soil. [51], Casement's knighthood was forfeited on 29 June 1916.[52]. In November 1914,[34] Casement negotiated a declaration by Germany which stated: The Imperial Government formally declares that under no circumstances would Germany invade Ireland with a view to its conquest or the overthrow of any native institutions in that country.

[25][page needed], In Ireland in 1904, on leave from Africa from that year until 1905, Casement joined the Gaelic League, an organisation established in 1893 to preserve and revive the spoken and literary use of the Irish language. He had been arrested on 21 April, giving the authorities only 3 weeks in which to forge the diaries, including rare up-country Congolese dialect phrases, which seems impossible.

In 1906 the Foreign Office sent Casement to Brazil: first as consul in Santos, then transferred to Pará,[20] and lastly promoted to consul-general in Rio de Janeiro. You don’t have to worry about grammar. A critical issue was whether the Treason Act of 1351 applied to actions outside the UK, which turned on whether or not a key provision was modified by a comma. [43], In the early hours of 21 April 1916, three days before the rising began, the German submarine put Casement ashore at Banna Strand in Tralee Bay, County Kerry. He was educated at the Diocesan School, Ballymena (later the Ballymena Academy). Two of the judges had visited the record office to inspect the original of the act and it was not clear whether the mark in question was a comma, bracket or even a fold in the paper. [58] The original diaries may be seen at the British National Archives in Kew. "[15], Casement worked in the Congo for Henry Morton Stanley and the African International Association from 1884; this association became known as a front for King Leopold II of Belgium in his takeover of what became the so-called "Congo Free State". If you're not familiar with Roger Casement he was a British diplomat who was heavily involved in human rights investigations. Ep 117 Author Nova Weetman, new doco on romance writing and 6 tips for getting more traffic on your author blog. During this period he continued to write in his diaries, and the one for 1911 was described as being unusually discursive. This defense went nowhere, as you would expect, prompting Casement to write, “God deliver from such antiquaries as these, to hang a man’s life upon a comma and throttle him with a semi-colon.” He was stripped of his knighthood and hanged. During his commercial work, he learned African languages. Even after his release from prison, Wilde hardly ever stopped complaining that the ignorant philistines had convicted an innocent man, but Casement faced his punishment manfully, on the logic that though he was disgraced, at least he came by his disgrace honestly. Contrary to German promises, they received no training in the use of machine guns, which at the time were relatively new and unfamiliar weapons. [49] Casement refused to agree to this, and was found guilty and was sentenced to be hanged. He was stripped of his knighthood and other honours. It now lies at a depth of 40 metres. The British Home Office refused to let him see them, and in his opinion — which, on this subject, was more informed than the average man’s — Casement’s biography could not be written without them. In the case of legal documents, sloppy punctuation can be disastrous, as we have seen.
Among those who appealed for clemency toward Casement were, W.B.

As late as July 2015 the UK National Archives ambiguously described the Black Diaries as "attributed to Roger Casement", while at the same time unambiguously declaring their satisfaction with the result of the private Giles Report. It was argued that this meant that the offence of treason included levying war against the king in his realm, or supporting the king’s enemies (located in the Realm, or elsewhere) by giving them ‘aid and comfort’ in the realm.
. The British-registered company was effectively controlled by the archetypal rubber baron Julio César Arana and his brother. He delivered a long, detailed eyewitness report to the Crown that exposed abuses: "the enslavement, mutilation, and torture of natives on the rubber plantations,"[18] becoming known as the Casement Report of 1904. It didn't matter where the crime was committed. The man who said he was to be ‘hanged on a comma’.