The first paramilitary prisoners to qualify for early release under the Belfast Agreement should be out of jail by the end of this month, according to the commission set up to run the scheme.
The joint chairmen of the Sentence Review Commission, Sir John Blelloch and Mr Brian Currin, said application forms will be issued to prisoners today to set the scheme in motion.
Some 420 prisoners, affiliated to the IRA, UVF and UDA/UFF, are eligible to apply for early release. Of these, 100 are serving life sentences. Sir John said yesterday that once a prisoner applied to the commission, the prisons department of the Northern Ireland Office had three weeks to make comments on the application.
"On the assumption that the application is fully conformed, and there are no particular concerns that the Northern Ireland Office would want to register with us, and our preliminary determination should be to accept the application, and all this is done within the time-scale laid down, then I would have thought it possible that the first prisoners would begin to come out at about the end of the month," Sir John said.
Mr Currin, a South African lawyer, said the commission had certain discretionary powers. In the case of life-sentence prisoners, it must decide if that prisoner would be a danger to society.
The commission must also determine whether a prisoner is a supporter of those organisations deemed by the Northern Secretary to be eligible for early release. Those affiliated to the LVF, the INLA, the Continuity IRA and "real IRA" are not eligible.
Sir John said the commission would set a release date for life sentence prisoners, while the prisons department would set the release date for fixed sentence prisoners once the commission had deemed them eligible for early release.
Sir John, a former senior civil servant at the NIO, said the commissioners were "very conscious" of the sensitivities of their task, and would meet political and church leaders and victims' groups. But he said the views of victims will not be a consideration in deciding release dates.
"I don't think the victims can influence the timing of the release because the criteria that we are bound to follow are those that are set down in the Act," he said.
Under the legislation, the victims or families of those killed by the prisoners being released have a right to know when they are being released.
There are 10 members on the commission and three commissioners will deal with each case by processing written applications. If either a prisoner or the prisons department objects to the commission's preliminary determination, oral hearings will be held. There will be no block releases, but Sir John said it could happen by coincidence that a number of prisoners would be released on the same day.
Mr Currin said the commission expects to function initially for six months, and this could be extended to 12 months.
Asked about comparisons with prisoner-release schemes in South Africa, Mr Currin said the system being used in the North was "a far more cautious one".
The Northern Secretary, Dr Mo Mowlam, said yesterday that in determining which prisoners were eligible to apply for early release under the terms of the agreement, the British government accepted that the IRA, the UVF and the UDA/UFF were maintaining unequivocal ceasefires.
"I think the war is certainly over for groups that have signed up to an unequivocal ceasefire, and their political representatives are in the talks process. I have accepted that they are acting in good faith and the security advice I get supports that," she said.
She added that the war was "certainly not over" for splinter groups, which were trying to destroy the prospects for peace and bring down the Belfast Agreement.
Her comments followed publication of an article in a Belfast newspaper yesterday in which the Sinn Fein leader, Mr Gerry Adams, said that "a peaceful transition to a just settlement and an independent and united Ireland" would require "more than words or word games about whether the war is over".
He added: "The war will be over when all of those who have engaged in war - and some are still engaging in war - stop; when the British army of occupation, which still maintains a huge military presence in republican areas, begins demilitarising instead of remilitarising; when all of the prisoners are free; when there is justice and equality and when we have a proper policing service."
Mr David Ervine, of the Progressive Unionist Party, said a declaration from the republican leadership that the war was over was needed to reassure unionists and to save the agreement. Mr Ervine said he had been seeking this declaration privately for some time, and was now calling for it publicly.