The mother of a teenager shot dead by two Scots Guards in Northern Ireland today vowed to take her bid to have his killers thrown out of the Army to the European Court of Human Rights.
Lawyers for Jean McBride confirmed they will consider an application to Strasbourg after a judge at Belfast High Court refused her application for a judicial review.
Father-of-two Peter McBride was gunned down as he ran away from a military checkpoint in the New Lodge district of north Belfast in September 1992.
Guardsmen Mark Wright and James Fisher served three years in jail for the 18-year-old Catholic's murder, but were allowed to rejoin the regiment and remain in the Army.
Mrs McBride's solicitor Peter Madden confirmed that an application may now be lodged with the European Court of Human Rights.
Mr Madden said: "Neither the guardsmen, their commanding officers, the chain of command nor the political and military establishment have ever acknowledged their wrongdoing. "It appears that all efforts have been made to ensure they are retained in the Army.
"It is Jean McBride's view that the earlier decisions of two differently constituted Army Boards to conclude that there were exceptional reasons to retain Fisher and Wright is based on a clear refusal by the establishment to accept the decisions of the trial judge, and later the Court of Appeal and House of Lords which rejected their appeals and found that they had lied during their trial."
Claims by the soldiers that they opened fire because of suspicions that Mr McBride was carrying a coffee jar bomb were rejected during their 1995 trial. They were sentenced to life imprisonment for murder but released three years later and allowed to return to the Army.
Last year Jim McDonald, assessor of military complaints procedures in Northern Ireland, insisted that the decision to let Wright and Fisher back in dealt a major blow to the forces' reputation. Amid nationalist fury at the decision, Mr McBride's family has mounted a tireless campaign to have the pair thrown out.
Their case was aided by a Court of Appeal ruling that an Army Board which brought Wright and Fisher back in had not produced the exceptional circumstances needed to justify the soldiers' retention. But with no judicial order for the MoD to act against them, the Government has resisted all demands for the authorities to intervene.