Directors Report July 1999

July 1999

British Irish RIGHTS WATCH has moved office. Our new address is: 13b Hillgate Place, London, SW12 9ES. Our office is close to Clapham South underground station on the Northern Line and to Balham British Rail station.

Our thanks to Emma Gill, Catherine McKenna, Miriam Andrews, Meghan Pendleton, Martin Smith, and Saimo Chahal for all their help. Owing to the move and to annual holidays, we will not be up and running until the beginning of September, and there will be no August Director's Report.

I am delighted to report that we have received a further donation of $5,000 from the Dunfey Family Fund, under the auspices of the American Ireland Fund. We are very grateful to the Dunfey family for not only their on-going financial support, but also for their heart-warming encouragement to us in our work.

British Irish RIGHTS WATCH has been monitoring the case of Christy Walsh for several years now. He was convicted in 1992 of possession of a coffee jar bomb and subsequently lost his appeal. He was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment. However, two new witnesses have since come forward who have backed up his consistent denial of involvement in this crime. We were surprised to learn recently that the Criminal Cases Review Commission have reached a preliminary decision not to refer his case back to the Court of Appeal. We have yet to learn their reasons for doing so, but we will be doing all that we can to assist his legal team in seeking to reverse this ruling.

We continue to receive information from a wide variety of sources concerning allegations of collusion between members of the security forces and paramilitaries throughout the 30 years of the conflict in Northern Ireland. On 9th July 1999 I met Congressman Ben Gilman, Chairman of the International Relations Committee of Congress, to discuss some of these cases.

In the past month the new police investigation by John Stevens into the murder in 1989 of Belfast solicitor Patrick Finucane has led to the arrests of four persons. One of them has been charged with the murder, another has been charged with other offences of possession of information useful to terrorists, and two appear to have been released without charge. Although these arrests are welcome, it is difficult to understand why it has taken ten years for them to happen, although we suspect that Stevens has been given access to materials, particularly Special Branch files, that he had not previously seen. So far, it seems to have been loyalists who may have played a role in the murder, rather than the main perpetrators, who have been arrested. Our report to the British government of February 1999 pointed to significant involvement and/or knowledge on the part of army intelligence and Special Branch. Patrick Finucane's murder was part of a much bigger picture which only a public inquiry with full judicial powers can hope to investigate properly.

On 6th July the English Court of Appeal heard an appeal by the Bloody Sunday Tribunal against the Divisional Court's ruling that soldiers granted anonymity by the Widgery Tribunal were entitled to retain it. Our thanks to Catherine McKenna for acting as our observer at the hearing. The Court of Appeal delivered its judgment on 29th July. It upheld the soldiers. The relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday and the injured feel that English judges have interfered in the running of the new Inquiry and shown little understanding of the realities of the situation in Northern Ireland. The believe that the independence and credibility of the new Inquiry has been seriously undermined. The Inquiry had decided not to appeal to the House of Lords, but information regarding the military background of Lord Woolf, who presided in the Court of Appeal, has raised similar questions about the perception of justice being seen to be done to those raised by Lord Hoffmann's links with Amnesty International in the Pinochet case, which may lead to the quashing of the Court of Appeal's decision and a re-hearing. In our view, the new Inquiry's decision not to grant anonymity unless individual soldiers could show that they were at risk struck a fair balance between the need for open justice and the need to protect the right to life. The Court of Appeal's decision has leaned too far in the soldiers' direction and has jeopardised the new Inquiry's chances of rectifying the injustice caused by the Widgery Tribunal.

Peter G. Eikenberry, Gerald P. Conroy, Judge Barbara S. Jones, Barbara P. Robinson and Judge Sidney Stein of the Association of the New York City Bar have produced a report on their mission last year to Northern Ireland, called Criminal Justice And Human Rights In Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It calls for many reforms in the criminal justice system and is a positive and timely contribution to the work of both the Patten commission on policing and the review of criminal justice, both of which were instigated under the Good Friday Agreement.

Another timely contribution to the debate on policing is the submission to the Patten commission by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Their submission looks at three main areas:
1) recruitment and modifying the size and composition of the force;
2) changes in police practices and structures; and
3) how the Commission can build support for its proposals within the police and within unionist, nationalist, and other communities in Northern Ireland.

We are pleased to announce that we will be producing a new edition of our guide to the human rights machinery of the UN, Human Wrongs, Human Rights, in the near future. The new edition will be published jointly with the Northern Ireland Commission for Human Rights, with whom we are very glad to be associated in this project. Details of how to obtain the book will be posted on our website once it is available. I should like to take this opportunity of thanking once again the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and in particular Stephen Pittam, for enabling us to develop this guide initially.

On 16th July we participated in a meeting with our colleagues in other human rights groups concerned with Northern Ireland. It was useful meeting that ranged over many topics. Although we are in daily touch with many of our sister NGOs, and increasingly make use of conference calls, there is a synergy about face-to-face meetings that is hard to beat.

We are pleased to welcome Donncha O'Connell as the first Director of ICCL. We wish him well in this important post and are glad to see ICCL going from strength to strength.

Jane Winter,
Director,
2nd August 1999

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