[House Hearing, 106 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
THE PATTEN COMMISSION REPORT ON POLICING IN NORTHERN IRELAND
=======================================================================
OPEN MEETING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 24, 1999
__________
Serial No. 106-103
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on International Relations
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
64-523 CC WASHINGTON : 2000
COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York, Chairman
WILLIAM F. GOODLING, Pennsylvania SAM GEJDENSON, Connecticut
JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa TOM LANTOS, California
HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
DOUG BEREUTER, Nebraska GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American
DAN BURTON, Indiana Samoa
ELTON GALLEGLY, California MATTHEW G. MARTINEZ, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey
CASS BALLENGER, North Carolina ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
DANA ROHRABACHER, California SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California ALCEE L. HASTINGS, Florida
PETER T. KING, New York PAT DANNER, Missouri
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio EARL F. HILLIARD, Alabama
MARSHALL ``MARK'' SANFORD, South BRAD SHERMAN, California
Carolina ROBERT WEXLER, Florida
MATT SALMON, Arizona STEVEN R. ROTHMAN, New Jersey
AMO HOUGHTON, New York JIM DAVIS, Florida
TOM CAMPBELL, California EARL POMEROY, North Dakota
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts
KEVIN BRADY, Texas GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
RICHARD BURR, North Carolina BARBARA LEE, California
PAUL E. GILLMOR, Ohio JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York
GEORGE P. RADANOVICH, California JOSEPH M. HOEFFEL, Pennsylvania
JOHN COOKSEY, Louisiana
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado
Richard J. Garon, Chief of Staff
Kathleen Bertelsen Moazed, Democratic Chief of Staff
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Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, Chairman
WILLIAM F. GOODLING, Pennsylvania CYNTHIA A. MCKINNEY, Georgia
HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American
DAN BURTON, Indiana Samoa
CASS BALLENGER, North Carolina EARL F. HILLIARD, Alabama
PETER T. KING, New York BRAD SHERMAN, California
MATT SALMON, Arizona WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
Grover Joseph Rees, Subcommittee Staff Director
Douglas C. Anderson, Counsel
gGary Stephen Cox, Democratic Staff Director
Nicolle A. Sestric, Staff Associate
C O N T E N T S
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Page
WITNESSES
The Right Honorable Chris Patten, Chairman, Independent
Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland; Accompanied by
Senator Maurice Hayes.......................................... 4
Michael Posner, Executive Director, Lawyers Committee for Human
Rights......................................................... 16
Michael Finucane, Son of Patrick Finucane, Slain Defense Attorney 19
Maggie Beirne, Committee on the Administration of Justice,
Belfast........................................................ 35
Julia Hall, Northern Ireland Researcher, Human Rights Watch...... 39
Jane Winter, Director, British Irish Rights Watch................ 44
APPENDIX
The Honorable Christopher H. Smith, a Representative in Congress
from The State of New Jersey, Chairman, Subcommittee on
International Operations and Human Rights...................... 56
The Honorable Benjamin A. Gilman, a Representative in Congress
from New York and Chairman, Committee on International
Relations Committee............................................ 60
Mr. Chris Patten................................................. 62
Mr. Michael Finucane............................................. 65
Mr. Michael Posner............................................... 71
Ms. Jane Winter.................................................. 90
Ms. Maggie Beirne................................................ 98
Ms. Julia Hall................................................... 105
Additional material submitted for the record:
Letter to Mr. Chris Patten, submitted by Rep. Gilman............. 111
Excerpt from the House of Commons, submitted by Rep Gilman....... 113
Submission from Irish American Unity Conference.................. 115
Submission from The Brehon Law Society........................... 123
THE PATTEN COMMISSION REPORT ON POLICING IN NORTHERN IRELAND
----------
Friday, September 24, 1999
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on International
Operations and Human Rights,
Committee on International Relations,
Washington, D.C.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:45 a.m. In
Room 2172 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher H.
Smith (chairman of the Subcommittee) Presiding.
Mr. Smith. Let me just begin by saying that the purpose of
this public meeting is for the Subcommittee with primary
jurisdiction over human rights to review the recent publication
``A New Beginning: Policing in Northern Ireland,'' and to hear
from its principal author, the Right Honorable Chris Patten.
This report was released on September 9 by the Independent
Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland which was
established by the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998.
[Copies of the report are available by contacting the
Subcommittee office.]
Mr. Smith. Mr. Patten, welcome to the Congress and thank
you for your generous commitment of time and talent in
reviewing policing in Northern Ireland. We are grateful for
your presence.
After 15 months of exhaustive study and outreach which
included over 10,000 people participating in public meetings;
1,000 individuals speaking at those meetings; more than 3,000
submitting written reviews; and countless small group meetings,
there is little doubt that the Commission moved comprehensively
and aggressively to pursue its mandate for ``a new beginning in
policing in Northern Ireland with a police service capable of
attracting and sustaining the support of the community as a
whole.''.
With over 175 recommendations for change and reform, it is
our sincerest hope that the recommendations contained within
the report become the starting point, the floor, and not the
ceiling, for policing reforms in Northern Ireland. This report,
promising because of the recommendations it contains, yet
disappointing for the problems it chose not to tackle, must be
a base from which the human rights and policing reforms are
built, rather than a high-water mark that recedes over the next
few weeks of public review.
I am encouraged by the Commission's own plea that ``the
essentials of our recommendations present a package which must
be implemented comprehensively. We advise in the strongest
terms against cherry-picking from this report.'' .
I am encouraged by the Commission's candid admission ``that
policing was at the heart of many of the problems that
politicians have been unable to resolve in Northern Ireland and
by the report's definition of policing as the protection of
human rights.'' The Commission's stated desire to reorient
policing onto an approach based on upholding human rights is a
recognition that Northern Ireland's police force, the RUC, has
failed at protecting human rights for Northern Ireland's
citizens for years.
Today's public session is the fourth in a series of
meetings held by this Subcommittee as it has focused on human
rights abuses in Northern Ireland. In each of our previous
proceedings, the subject of policing and human rights abuses by
the RUC was central. In fact, next week will mark the 1-year
anniversary of testimony we received from defense attorney
Rosemary Nelson who told us that she feared the RUC, had been
harassed by it, and even physically assaulted by RUC members.
She received death threats, and she told us right from where
you are sitting, Mr. Patten, that she literally feared for her
life. We find it appalling that still not a single RUC officer
has been disciplined for the death threats and other
harassments that she endured.
I am disappointed that while the Commission acknowledged
that the RUC has had several officers within its ranks over the
years who have abused their position, it nevertheless declined
to comment on a vetting mechanism to rid the force of those who
have committed egregious acts of abuse and violence. It is
worth noting with regret that the RUC officers who harassed
Rosemary Nelson and perhaps were connected with her
assassination are still on the job today. Even the police
officers who beat David Adams while he was in detention at
Castlereagh in 1994 have never been criminally prosecuted.
Last year, after meeting with Param Cumaraswamy, the U.N.
Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers--
and he, too, came and spent some time with our Committee and
spoke again from where you sit--I know that the Members of this
Subcommittee wrote to the Commission asking that the Commission
address the recommendations put forth by the Special Rapporteur
regarding RUC harassment of defense attorneys and the
establishment of a judicial inquiry in the allegation of
collusion into the murder of defense attorney Patrick Finucane.
Regrettably, the report fails to make recommendations that
would curb the harassment of defense attorneys, and there is
not a mention of the ongoing, still evolving implications of
RUC-Special Branch complicity in Finucane's murder. Unless I
missed something in the report, Special Branch, long tainted
with allegations of collusion, will simply merge with the Crime
Branch. Perhaps you can elaborate on that during your comments.
The Commission spent a great deal of time on
recommendations for the reductions of the size of the force and
trying to correct the imbalance, and I think that provides some
very good recommendations that hopefully will be followed.
Let me just conclude by saying--and I would ask unanimous
consent among my colleagues that my full comments be made a
part of the record--we do have concerns about plastic bullets
and we did note that you had recommended there be a diminution
in their use while other methods of crowd control are looked
at. But it does strike me that they can be used in the rest of
the U.K. The hope would be that these very lethal batons would
be banned, as has been recommended by numerous bodies,
including the United Nations.
We also take note that we would have hoped the Emergency
Powers would have been done away with. You seemingly say that
and recommend that, and yet some of the verbiage that follows
seems to render that recommendation moot: Perhaps it ought to
continue ``as long as there is a problem.'' The Emergency
Powers are one of the sources, we believe, of the continued
problems or troubles in Northern Ireland, and we would hope
that they would be eliminated as well.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Smith appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Smith. I would like to yield to my good friend, the
Chairman of the Full Committee, Mr. Gilman, for any comments he
might have.
Mr. Gilman. Thank you for putting together today's
important and timely meeting regarding some very critical
events in the history of Northern Ireland. I want to welcome
now Commissioner Patten, former Chairman Patten of the Policing
Commission, and Senator Maurice Hayes, a Member of the
Commission, for their good work and constructive suggestions.
Mr. Chairman. Your tireless efforts to help put respect for
human rights and the critical role of defense counsel on top of
the agenda for the new North of Ireland are what we all want
and expect under the Good Friday Accord to help bring a better
understanding.
We also want to welcome Ambassador Heyman who is here with
us from the European Union, and his good staff. We are indeed
fortunate to have Chairman Patten, now newly confirmed
Commissioner for Exterior Relations for the European Union, who
recently rendered his final report and findings under the terms
mandated by the Good Friday Accord for a new beginning for
policing in Northern Ireland.
Few issues, day to day, impact more the lives of the people
of the north, than their relationship with local police. Police
can either serve to protect the people or be part of the
problem, not the solution, in a divided community as in the
north.
As our House Speaker Hastert said the day that the Patten
report was issued, ``Acknowledging that there is a problem is
the first step in finding a solution to that problem,'' and the
Patten report is useful for that purpose. It has many
constructive proposals. I support the sentiments of the Speaker
and have called the Patten report a good first step. The
struggle for change in policing in the North is not over, its
just begun. We now await the British Government's full and
prompt implementation of all of the Commission's
recommendations which should be just the beginning, not the
end, of reform. I think its implementation will be whether or
not this report will be successful in the long run.
The ultimate test and real change will come when the
minority nationalist Catholic community can also call the
police service its own and reflect that support by joining the
new police service in representative numbers to its population
in the community.
Today the RUC is a Protestant police force for one segment
of the community. Change has to come, hopefully sooner rather
than later. While Chairman Patten's mandate was part of a new
beginning for policing in the north, one cannot in good
conscience ignore the past history in the Royal Ulster
Constabulary and its relationship with the minority nationalist
community.
We will be hearing later today from witnesses from the
north whose lives and families have been tragically impacted by
the acts of the RUC. Whether through possible collusion in the
murder and the making of threats to those defense attorneys
merely charged with securing fair play and justice for their
clients, the past history of the RUC is sadly checkered. Theirs
are not the only families touched by the RUC in one way or
other. Thousands of others have been hurt as well, including
police officers and their families. We all heard case after
case in our Full Committee hearings this past April on the RUC,
and we need not recount them here today.
With that checkered past and the Patten Commission's first
step to a new beginning to policing, we are calling on the
British Government to move forward into the new and shared
future of policing in the north. It can even do more. The
Patten report leaves some serious gaps that will make the new
future for policing in the north difficult: for example, not
calling for weeding out the bad apples who have abused human
rights in the past, and for new leadership at the top, these
oversights will make the real reform hard to bring about.
In addition, not banning police membership in sectarian
associations whose very purpose goes counter to fair, impartial
and responsible community policing, will also make real
concrete change very difficult.
We will be examining these and other proposals in our
Committee, and I want to welcome Chairman Patten again and
thank him for a very difficult but a well done job, along with
his Commission. We look forward to hearing from you,
Commissioner, and our other witnesses today.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Gilman appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Smith. Mr. Patten, the floor is yours. We will have
time for opening statements from all the Members later on.
Commissioner Patten does have a very limited time here. We
yield to him.
STATEMENT OF THE RIGHT HONORABLE CHRIS PATTEN, CHAIRMAN,
INDEPENDENT COMMISSION ON POLICING FOR NORTHERN IRELAND;
ACCOMPANIED BY SENATOR MAURICE HAYES
Mr. Patten. First of all, thank you very much for allowing
Senator Hayes and me to attend this briefing and to spend at
least some time with you this morning before I go back to what
has just become my life as a Commissioner for the European
Union.
I am delighted that Maurice is able to join me. Maurice was
one of the 7 other Members of the Commission. Maurice has had a
record of public service in Northern Ireland which is second to
none. He was the ombudsman and he is now, among other things, a
Senator in Dublin. After me, he will say a few words.
There were 7 other Members of the Commission. We had two
Members from the United States, a distinguished police officer
from Massachusetts and a distinguished police trainer and
academic from New York, and they made a major contribution to
our work, as did a number of police forces around the United
States and indeed North America as a whole.
I hope you will forgive me for beginning on a rather
personal note in talking about a report which has been
denounced as wicked--as meaning that any police officer who is
ever killed in the future in Northern Ireland should be on my
conscience--denounced this morning in a newspaper in London
called the Daily Telegraph as bringing an end to the rule of
law.
This is the toughest job I have ever done, and I have done
one or two which were not exactly pushovers. Tough for two
reasons. The parties that were able to negotiate the Good
Friday Agreement, providing a prospective peace and normality
and democracy in Northern Ireland, were able to agree on the
outlines of government. The one thing that they couldn't agree
on was policing. So they called in 8 people from around the
world to try to do the job for them.
Second, why tough? To some extent, we found ourselves
operating like a truth and reconciliation commission in
circumstances where sometimes--and it is understandable there
seemed to be more demand for truth and reconciliation than
there was supply. We held 40 public meetings around Northern
Ireland. People said nobody is going to go to a public meeting.
Nobody goes to public meetings these days. Well, over 10,000
people came to those public meetings. Over 1,000 people spoke
at them.
I can remember a meeting in a little village cinema in
Kilkeel, a fishing village in the shadow of the Mournes.
Protestant fishing fleet, Catholic farmers in the hinterland.
We had a noisy and quite a good meeting. At the end of it, I
made the sort of speech that we all can make terribly well as
politicians about reconciliation and healing and hope. At the
end of it, after I had finished, to my consternation I saw a
little lady at the back of the cinema getting up to say
something. I sat down rather nervously. She said, ``Well, Mr.
Patten, I have heard what you say about reconciliation and I
voted yes in the referendum campaign, but I hope you will
realize how much more difficult that is for us here than it is
for you, coming from London. That man there murdered my son,''
and it was true. On both sides of the community, that is the
reality in Northern Ireland. Two stories, two sets of pain, two
sets of anguish.
We had an evening which began on the Garvaghy Road. I
remember Robert Hamill's sister talking to us about his murder,
and the meeting was chaired with considerable integrity and
skill, difficult meeting by Rosemary Nelson. We then went down
the road to Craigavon, and we had four police widows, one after
another, telling us their stories, ending with Mrs. Graham
whose husband had the back of his head shot off, a community
policeman, in 1997. Mrs. Graham finished her remarks by saying,
``You know, my husband wasn't a Catholic, but he didn't regard
himself as a Protestant. He tried to behave like a Christian.''
I have to say that I went back from those two meetings that
night and had the largest drink I have ever had in my life.
Well, we did our best; and if anybody can do it better,
welcome. We produced a report which is unanimous. But what were
our terms of reference? To bring forward proposals to ensure
that policing arrangements, including composition, recruitment,
training, culture, ethos symbols are such that a new approach,
Northern Ireland has a police service that can enjoy widespread
support from and is seen as an integral part of the community
as a whole.
I would be interested in how anybody could produce
recommendations which came closer to meeting those terms of
reference. At the center of our argument is a simple
proposition derided by British newspapers like the Daily
Telegraph and one or two others, people who are more extreme in
what they say about the RUC than any serving RUC officer would
ever be.
At the heart of our argument is that what has to happen in
Northern Ireland is to take the politics out of policing and to
take the police out of politics. To separate the police from
what has been for decades the most contentious political
argument, that is, the nature of the State itself. The whole
basis of the Agreement does that.
What does the Agreement--what does the Agreement assert? It
says that in return for Nationalists accepting that political
change can only come through democracy, through the ballot box,
establishing the primary loyalty of Nationalists and
Republicans to the democratic process, in return for that,
Unionists will recognize that Nationalists have other loyalties
and are not obliged to demonstrate their primary loyalty to the
institutions of the State which they want to see changed
through the democratic process.
So when it came to establishing the Northern Ireland
Assembly, to contemplating the establishment of the Northern
Ireland Executive, no one has any difficulty agreeing that you
can have an oath of office which doesn't have anything to do
with loyalty to the State. Nobody argues about a logo, an
emblem for the Northern Ireland Assembly, which has nothing to
do with the contentious emblems of a contentious State, and yet
people still insist that the police should be identified with
the State in a way which is totally contrary to practice in
liberal democracies. We don't regard in the rest of the United
Kingdom the police as an arm of the State; we regard them as
the upholders of the rule of law.
I think it is intolerable that some people should still
seek to fix the police at the center of that political
argument, should still insist that the police should be a
political football in Northern Ireland. Political footballs get
kicked; actually, worse still in Northern Ireland, political
footballs get shot and blown up.
The best service we can do for all of the victims of
violence in Northern Ireland is to end a situation in which
those who should uphold the rule of law are directly related to
the main contentious political argument. That is why we have
said what we have said about name and emblems and so on.
Our argument is that policing is about the protection of
human rights. Now, I have been amazed that some people have
contested that proposition. But it is clearly the case that the
police are there to protect individual people's human rights,
to exercise their own powers in a way which recognizes other
people's human rights. Also we have to recognize that the
police have human rights as well, which have to be protected.
We have suggested a whole structure for ensuring that there
is democratic accountability for policing in Northern Ireland,
though it will obviously depend crucially on what happens to
the institutions of government proposed in the Good Friday
Agreement.We have put forward imaginative and wide-ranging
proposals on their management, on training and on structure.
Perhaps I can touch on two issues since you have mentioned
them. One, the Special Branch; and two, public order policing.
On the Special Branch, we have argued that while it is very
important that Northern Ireland that the police service in
Northern Ireland--has an adequate counterterrorist capacity, we
don't think that the present size of the Special Branch is easy
to justify. We don't think that the structure of the Special
Branch makes sense. We think that the Special Branch should be
treated in the same way as happens in London or most British
police forces, or the Garda, for that matter, and that Special
Branch functions and capacities are brigaded with those
involved in the fight against crime.
It is going to be particularly important because in a more
peaceful, secure environment, which we will look forward to, I
think Northern Ireland may well face bigger problems in the
areas of organized crime and drug-running and so on.
The other thing that we have proposed is that there should
be a senior judicial figure as a commissioner responsible for
the oversight of all covert policing--surveillance, intercepts,
use of informants--and that there should be a complaints
tribunal to which people can go if they feel that their civil
liberties have been infringed by covert policing operations.
That would put Northern Ireland ahead--though I think
change will happen in Great Britain as well--ahead of the rest
of the United Kingdom in ensuring that our position is entirely
in line with the European Convention on Human Rights.
On plastic baton rounds. Well, we have, as you know,
proposed a more restrictive regime for the use of plastic baton
rounds, but much as we would have liked to have done so, we
have not been able to argue that plastic baton rounds should be
completely done away with. Why? Because during our hearings, a
police officer was killed with a blast bomb by loyalist thugs
in policing a public order demonstration. Why? because police
officers have to contend with blast bombs and petrol bombs when
they are policing public order demonstrations.
I totally accept, as I said, closer regulation of the use
of plastic baton rounds, but when we said to some senior
American police officers ``What would you do if people threw
petrol bombs at you? ``They said we would use live rounds.'' I
think it is important that there should be less lethal
equipment available to policing before they have to do that.
We have argued for more investment in technology of other
sorts of public order policing. We have argued for more
investment in water cannons. But, alas, much as I would liked
to have done so, I did not feel that I could put my name to a
report which completely removed plastic baton rounds, and
particularly as we were writing within months of the police in
the Netherlands, in Rotter Dam, when facing a football riot,
using live rounds to cope with it.
I think that there are two other issues that I would like
to touch on this morning before concluding my remarks:
The first. I think it is very important that the new police
service in Northern Ireland should not be isolated, should not
be cutoff from the rest of the world. We have said a good deal
in our report about cooperation with the Garda Siochana and
other police services. I have to say that I know that I am
treading on controversial ground with distinguished Members of
this Committee, but where foreign police services bring
together Northern Ireland police officers and members of the
Garda, I think they are doing the community in Northern Ireland
a signal service.
Composition. We have put forward a lot of detailed
proposals which would ensure that within a decade, about a
third of the police service in Northern Ireland was Catholic,
Nationalist, Republican. I think that the rate of change, the
rate of progress we have suggested, is pretty much at the
margins of the possible.
New York, for example, dealing with the problem of ethnic
imbalance, the New York police moved from 12 percent ethnic
minorities to 33 percent in 25 years. In comparison, the rate
of progress which we are suggesting is pretty heroic, but I
think it is achievable. What it is going to depend on is
Catholic and Nationalist and Republican community leaders, and
political leaders encouraging young men and women to become
police officers.
I think we have opened the door and it is very important
that others encourage Catholics to go through that door. I hope
that, as some Nationalists have reacted in the last few weeks
in a welcome way in Northern Ireland, others will follow.
Let me just say a word about implementation of the report.
The British Government--and I don't speak for them, this has
been an independent Commission--the British Government have
said that they are going to consult on the report until
November and then presumably begin the process of change.
We have suggested that in order to oversee change, there
should be an Oversight Commissioner who would visit Northern
Ireland regularly to establish that the report was being
implemented, and that if in some areas change was taking place
slowly, there was an adequate justification for that. Clearly
the political situation and the security situation in some
areas will affect the pace of change, although overall I think
regardless of the political and security situation, much of
what we propose could take place.
I wonder if I can ask Maurice to add a word.
Senator Hayes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for
the honor to speak to the Committee. I know some of the Members
from before, and your interest in the subject.
Chris was talking about the public meetings that we had. I
remember the first one which was on Shankill Road in Belfast.
After a very contentious meeting, there was an old lady who had
not spoken all evening, and she came over to me and she said,
``Son, you can only do your best.'' I thought she captured the
sense of the difficulty of the task and the integrity of the
people concerned. There was difficulty in finding a resolution
between polar opposites, and the likelihood that no one would
thank us for it anyway. She has been right, I think, on most
scores.
I took on this job out of admiration for those political
leaders and their courage and vision and the historical
compromise in the Good Friday Agreement, and I thought that no
citizen could refuse to help under those circumstances. What we
have done is deeply rooted in the Agreement. Our terms of
reference were written for us in quite some detail by the
framers of the Agreement. I think anybody applying a reasonable
checklist will see that we have addressed all of them as
thoroughly as we can. They did not equip us with subpoena
powers. They did not equip us with an investigatory arm, and
they did not equip us with a means of going over former cases
or reviewing past events, and we could only assume that they
wanted us to look forward.
The Good Friday Agreement itself is a forward-looking
document. It does tend to draw a line on the past. It does base
the whole future of society on mutual respect, on equality of
respect for the different traditions in Northern Ireland. That
is why we have looked forward.
We have informed ourselves of what went on in the past. We
have read previous reports, but basically to ensure that the
events which took place will not take place as far as can be
prevented in the future.
It seemed to us that the spirit of the Agreement was one of
looking forward, and it would seem odd under those
circumstances, where you are letting prisoners out of jail, to
be proposing to put policemen in. We didn't give anybody
amnesty. There is nobody who is immune to the law, to the
prosecution of cases; and some of the cases you mentioned are
being investigated and may well lead to prosecution and
appearances in the court. It would have been wrong for us, I
think, to have become involved in that.
In addition to that, we have the position of the
independent Police Ombudsman who we recommended should be able
to review all records of officers and previous files.
I think this is largely a managerial document. It imposes
its controls in a managerial way. It may not be melodramatic
enough for people who wanted to see blood on the floor, but I
can assure you that a careful reading of that will show you
that accountability is intended for the establishment and the
maintenance of professional policing practices.
There are a few themes running through the report. One is
accountability; accountability at the political level, at the
local level, accountability at the managerial level to ensure
these professional standards.
The second is transparency. People know their rights in
relation to the police. The police know what they can't do and
must do.
The third is respect for human rights.
The fourth is community representativeness and
effectiveness and efficiency.
The Holy Grail in all of this is the participation of young
Catholic and Nationalist people in the police force.
The quest everywhere in the world is for community
policing, community policing with the consent of the community
being policed. Policing in harmony with the community and
cooperation with the community, by a police force which is
itself representative of the community and which carries the
respect of the community. It doesn't mean Catholic policemen to
deal with Catholics and a Protestant police force to deal with
Protestants, but a police force which commands the respect of
the whole community. To do that, it has to be representative,
and it was for that reason we had to take down the barriers
which prevented young Catholics from adhering to the police, to
get that percentage up from 8 percent to somewhere near the
demographic balance.
A test of our recommendations will be that young Catholic
and young Protestant youth can stand up at youth clubs in their
own district and say ``I am going to join the police'', without
being jeered out of existence or being kicked out. That is the
test. I think it is a challenge, and I think we have created
structures on which others can build. It is a dynamic process.
It is indeed, as you say, a beginning, but I believe we made an
honest and a decent beginning.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much.
Mr. Smith. I think you and Commissioner Patten make your
points extraordinarily well, and because time is limited and I
have a number of questions, I will reduce mine to one.
I would ask you to help us to understand something. Senator
Hayes, I think your point about being forward-looking is a very
good one. But it also seems to me that a vetting process,
especially in the Special Branch, but throughout the RUC, is
not mutually exclusive of a forward-looking position; because
if people who have committed egregious abuses in the past stay
in the same jobs or work up the chain of command, your reform
is only as good as your weakest link.
This Committee has met with the three individuals who did
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in El Salvador. We have
looked at other efforts to try to look forward, and also at the
present and past. Perhaps jail is not what everyone needs to
look at for those offending police, but at least they need to
be taken out of the positions where they can continue to do
harm. I remember that it was said to those who committed
atrocities in El Salvador: You can never run for office, you
are finished. In terms of public performance, you are persona
non grata. If those people are still in those positions
undermining investigations, that could seriously erode reform
as you go forward.
Senator Hayes. They will not necessarily be in those
positions. One of the things that we have recommended is quite
a serious program of training and retraining for everybody in
the organization, one made necessary because of the
incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into
British domestic law. That has enormous impacts, and all of the
police have to be trained for that.
Second, it is a police force which has been geared, for
reasons which we all know, to the conflict situation for 25
years, and they are now having to move into a quite different
style and culture of policing with the community in a peaceful
society, and that requires retraining.
There will also be repostings. One of the things that we
have suggested is tenure; that nobody should stay in a place
like the Special Branch or the special units for more than 5
years without going back to community policing.
The proportion of people who are in community policing at
the moment is actually quite small. We are proposing that the
center be community policing. That means people will be
relocated. There is another important change actually in that,
up to the present, policemen in Britain and Ireland could only
be dismissed for gross misconduct or for crime, not for
inefficiency, and we are asking every police officer to
subscribe to a declaration of respect for human rights and
human dignity and service to the community. That is what they
are being judged against. It can be a constabulary offense not
to be adaptable to change, and we think that in that way people
will be moved around. People will be trained and some people
might decide that this is not the sort of policing for which
they joined.
Mr. Smith. Would you support the police board or the
ombudsman establishing a vetting process as the next step?
Retraining is one thing, but there is this issue of justice and
people being removed who have committed abuse or beatings in
Castlereagh or anywhere else.
Senator Hayes. I know the problem that you raise, and it is
a very difficult one to deal with, and I welcome any practical
steps that can do it, but there is a difficulty between
establishing a vetting process which is clear on the one hand,
and a witch hunt on the other. The situation is very clear at
the moment, and I would not want to destabilize it actually by
increasing the uncertainty for the good and honorable
policemen, of whom there are very many.
Mr. Patten. I am strongly in favor of vigorous management,
making sure that those who are in the police service are living
up to the oath that they would have taken. I am very much
against witch hunts.
The other thing that I would add is that under our
proposals for changing composition, for recruitment, for
downsizing, within 10 years Northern Ireland would have not
only about a third of a force which is Catholic and Nationalist
and Republican, but would also have a 50 percent completely new
force. Half the police service in Northern Ireland would be
new, and I think in that sort of turnover in the police service
in composition, it should be possible to deal with any bad
apples.
Mr. Smith. I can't let the one comment go by. I am opposed
to a witch hunt as well, as is everybody; but every police
force does have an internal affairs department and is
continually vetting its own.
Mr. Patten. Absolutely. We are very strong about internal
accountability and relating strong management to training and
retraining. I don't think we would disagree with anything that
is done in a decent police service in North America.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Gilman.
Mr. Gilman. Thank you.
Chairman Patten, we have seen in the past, British
commissions have come and gone and many have left their reports
on the shelf to gather dust, and we hope certainly that is not
going to be the result here.
Do you believe that the British Government is fully
committed to implementing your report?
Mr. Patten. A former British Prime Minister described royal
commissions as taking minutes and wasting years, and I wouldn't
like to think that Maurice and I and 6 of our colleagues had
wasted our year, but I can't speak for the British Government,
though I used to be able to until the electorate took another
view.
I think the only person who can answer the question on
implementation is Mo, the Secretary of State. But I think all
of us have been grateful for the positive things which the
British Government have said about our report.
I should add, I have been pleased about the positive things
that police services around the world have said about our
report, serving police officers here in North America, serving
police officers in the rest of the United Kingdom, serving
police officers in the Republic.
What Mo Mowlam has said, is that she is going to give
people in Northern Ireland until November to comment on the
report, and then she is going to announce what she is going to
carry forward. Obviously I hope that nobody starts cherry-
picking in this document, because I think it hangs together as
a whole.
Some people have said that they are going to put forward
their own proposals. The official Unionists who have opposed
our report say that they are going to put forward their
proposals. I hope they are able, if they do, to put forward
proposals better than ours in ensuring that policing
arrangements are such that Northern Ireland has a police
service which can enjoy widespread support and an integral part
of the community as a whole.
Mr. Gilman. I have one more question. Chief Constable
Flanagan indicated that membership in loyalist orders like the
Orange Orders are totally inconsistent with building broad
community support. In his statement he made before the House of
Commons in March of this past year, Mr. Flanagan, in responding
to a query of that nature and memberships, said, ``I said it is
more a matter of perception. But in giving my answer, Chairman,
I think I recognize the importance of perception and I stress
my personal preference that my offices should not be members of
the organizations referred to,'' talking about these kinds of
orders.
Yet the Patten Commission report didn't recommend any ban
on membership by police officers in those kinds of orders. Has
the report therefore left a legacy in place that could erode
the new police service?
Mr. Patten. No. I note what Sir Ronnie says about
preferring that people weren't members, not just of the Loyal
Orders, but of other similar institutions, even though they may
have a different religious background. I think that we are
looking at organizations including Masons, Loyal Orders, the
Ancient Order of Hibernians, and others.
I think you have to draw a distinction if you believe in
civil liberties and freedoms. I think you have to draw a
distinction between what people may think and the way that they
act. I think what we can expect from police officers is
impartiality.
Now, none of our investigations suggested that there were
many members of the Loyal Orders or the Ancient Order of
Hibernians in the police service in Northern Ireland, but we
concluded that if you wanted a police service that reflected
the whole community, it wouldn't be right, and it would
certainly infringe against most of my civil libertarian
instincts, to deny anybody the right to be a member of any of
those orders.
What we have said is that membership of any institution
should be declared and available to the police service and to
the police ombudsman. Beyond that, I wouldn't wish to go,
although I note what Sir Ronnie and other police chiefs have
said about their preference. But there is a difference between
asserting that preference and actually taking on a fairly
fundamental civil liberties issues.
Mr. Gilman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Gejdenson.
Mr. Gejdenson. It seems that the British and the American
Governments play a pretty strong role universally to press
forward in human rights and the development of democratic and
civil societies. At an earlier meeting this morning, we talked
about trying to do that in the former Soviet Union. I wonder
what you think that the British Government and the U.S.
Government could do to accelerate the process in Northern
Ireland. Senator Mitchell is over there now and we are hopeful
that he will move the process forward.
It seems that in areas where we have very little historical
bond, we are sometimes able to move things more rapidly than
here in Northern Ireland. There are places that the British
Government has been immensely helpful in resolving disputes,
ethnic religious disputes. Here, at our doorstep, in a sense,
we seem to be kind of floundering at this point.
Mr. Patten. I place on record our gratitude to not only the
American members of our Commission for the contribution they
made, but the contribution made by police services right across
the United States to our deliberations. Similarly, anybody who
is as passionately concerned about the future of Northern
Ireland as I am has to feel a huge debt of gratitude to Senator
Mitchell, who has done an extraordinary job.
What must be very frustrating for him is that I guess he
felt, not unreasonably on Good Friday last year, that he had
done the difficult bit, and that implementing what had been
agreed should be fairly straightforward. He is now back trying
to persuade local political leaders to implement it, with it
still being the case that all of the opinion polls demonstrate
substantial majority support for making a reality of the
agreement. After all, what is the alternative?
I think you've been very helpful and I think we are getting
to the stage where the future of stability and peace and
prosperity in Northern Ireland is going to be self-evident and
very plainly in the hands of political leaders in Northern
Ireland, and I hope they won't let down those they represent
who I think want, with a burning passion, this to succeed.
In relation to the policing issue, I think it is very
similar. It has been very interesting that, for example, the
press in Northern Ireland have been much more positive about
our report than parts of the press in the rest of the country.
Mr. Smith. Mr. King.
Mr. Patten. With great apologies, I am going to have to
move on in a minute because I have got White House and other
engagements. But if Maurice can stay--no, you have to leave,
too. Perhaps a couple more questions.
Mr. Smith. Mr. King.
Mr. King. Mr. Patten, I would like to welcome you here
today and commend you on the outstanding job that you have
done. I also would like to welcome back Anthony Cary. It seems
like only yesterday that you left.
I identify myself also with the remarks of Chairman Smith
on the vetting issue and Chairman Gilman on the political will
to implement the full Agreement, because I believe it would
have to be implemented in full to have full significance.
I would like to ask you why, in view of the fact that there
have been widespread allegations and evidence about RUC
complicity or threats being made against Pat Finucane or
Rosemary Nelson, why there is no reference made to either of
those cases in your report?
Mr. Patten. There is no reference for the simple reason
that we followed our terms of reference. We weren't set up as a
judicial inquiry with the powers that an inquiry would have.
For example, the inquiry that is now looking into the deaths in
Derry. We weren't set up with those powers. But nevertheless,
we sought to propose policing arrangements for the future,
which would ensure that the sort of allegations that have been
made about what happened in the past could not be true in the
future--which would make it very difficult to do anything in
the future such as is alleged to have taken place in the past.
Because of legal issues I have to be careful how I put these
things.
We thought that in order to put forward adequate
arrangements for the future, we had to read the reports of what
had happened in the past. We asked for and were given access to
all those reports--Stalker, Sampson, Stevens--and we saw the
authors of those reports.
What we say in our report reflects our study of those
documents. As you know, Stevens is still going. As you know,
there are ongoing at least one ongoing court case and
conceivably others. But I want to assure you that what we have
said about issues from covert policing to the future of the
Special Branch and to the general issue of accountability and
to the role of the policing board reflects what we saw and
read.
Mr. Neal. Commissioner Patten we can't get past the fact
that Senator Mitchell is back for the review because the
Unionists have said no to implementation of the Good Friday
Agreement. Tomorrow the Grand Orange Order in Belfast is going
to meet to oppose what it is that you have authored. You have
received high marks throughout your career, and the study that
you have undertaken here is a good start, and I think we would
all acknowledge that.
But having said that, we have all shared one common
experience, and that is that we have all seen architectural
renderings that look marvelous and then we have seen the
building, and oftentimes there is a difference.
Your report to be implemented is also going to have to go
through stages of parliamentary action before it is fully
implemented. How are we to be assured that this issue which
cuts to the core of many of the differences in the North of
Ireland will ever be implemented in the manner in which you
have recommended?
Mr. Patten. The main critics of our report in the media,
and I suspect in politics as well, are people who don't really
like the Agreement at all, are people who view the attempt to
accommodate decent Nationalist aspirations as somehow a
treachery. It is easy, isn't it, to criticize every attempt to
show generosity of spirit, to argue for moderation; easy to
criticize every such attempt as appeasement, as a surrender of
the rule of law.
I repeat the point, what do these critics suggest should
replace the Good Friday Agreement? What do they suggest should
be done to ensure that police officers get the support right
across the community which they deserve.
The answers to Northern Ireland's problems isn't to turn
the clock back. The answer to Northern Ireland's problems isn't
to remember every old feud and humiliation and tragedy. The
answer is to try to move forward.
Now, I think our policing report is absolutely fundamental
to moving forward. I hope that the government will conclude
that after listening to views. I hope that the House of Commons
will conclude that after debating our recommendations. I hope
that the people of Northern Ireland will conclude that as well.
I don't think this report is going to look at all bad
against the great sweep of events in Northern Ireland, but that
is less important than whether it really does shape a policing
service which the people of Northern Ireland deserve.
Everybody, I hope, should regard this report as an opportunity
for a new beginning, for a police service which everybody can
sign up to, everybody can join, everybody can give their full-
hearted consent to.
Maurice, do you want to add anything?
Senator Hayes. One of the most important recommendations we
made is for an implementation supervisor, and the idea of this
is for a figure of international standing and repute who could
hold all parties to account, including governments and
treasuries responsible for providing the money, and that is a
key and integral part of the thing, to prevent the kind of
outcome that Congressman Neal was referring to.
Mr. Patten. But after his heroic efforts, I strongly
suspect that we can't anticipate Senator Mitchell volunteering
for the job.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Crowley.
Mr. Crowley. First, Mr. Patten, and Senator Hayes, thank
you for your work on this long-awaited document. We had a
recent meeting with members of the RUC--and this is just a
quick statement. One of the questions I had was why is it that
you cannot change the color of the uniform from green to blue.
The answer, we were told by the RUC, was that green is an Irish
color and we like that color as opposed to moving it from a
military to a policing color.
I make that statement because of a concern of something so
simple to do compared to what you are proposing, some 175
specific recommendations of change that will radically change
the police department if it is imposed. My question is, why
didn't we just start all over? Instead of 175 complex changes?
Why not just throw the whole ball of wax out and start all
over?
Mr. Patten. I don't know many people who seriously think in
Northern Ireland that we could close down the police service
tomorrow and somehow find a new one overnight. I just don't
think that was ever a realistic option. Of course, one or two
people argued it to us and we considered it; but I think that
was as unrealistic an option as doing nothing at all, as
finding even the uniform too difficult to contemplate.
I think we had to find proposals which were rooted in the
real world, and I think our proposals are. I think we offer a
transformed policing service in Northern Ireland, as
transformed as policing services have been in some other
communities, not the least in North America. I very much hope
that when you visit Northern Ireland in the future, you will be
able to see those police officers walking the streets
everywhere, dealing with crime and difficulties in every
neighborhood, and being welcomed in every neighborhood as well.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. We would like to submit some written
questions. Obviously some people here didn't get a chance to
ask questions, and if you would be so kind to respond, it would
help us.
Mr. Patten. Thank you very much.
Mr. Smith. I would like to present the second panel,
beginning with Michael Posner, Executive Director of the
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, since its inception in
1978. Mr. Posner who served on the board for Amnesty
International, America's Watch, and the International League
for Human Rights, has been a visiting lecturer at Yale law
school and Columbia University law school and has provided
testimony to this Subcommittee numerous times, and I can say
without any fear of anyone contradicting me, this Committee
greatly values your contributions.
Michael Finucane is an attorney and the eldest son of
Patrick Finucane, a Belfast solicitor who was murdered in front
of his family in 1989. In his work for the Pat Finucane Center,
Michael has actively sought justice and full disclosure of the
facts behind that heinous crime. We appreciated your previous
testimony before the Committee and applaud you for your courage
in the face of incredible hardship and sorrow and adversity in
standing up for human rights in Northern Ireland.
Mr. Smith. Michael, if you can begin.
STATEMENTS OF MICHAEL POSNER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, LAWYERS
COMMITTEE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
Mr. Posner. First of all, I want to thank you, Chairman
Smith, for your longstanding interest and active involvement in
these issues, and thank this Committee for being a forum for
these discussions now and hopefully in the future.
First, I should say, we also share--and I have a written
statement which I would like to make part of the record, but in
it we say that the Lawyers Committee also appreciates the
stellar work of Chairman Patten and the Commission on Policing.
They took on an enormously difficult task and did it with great
care and attention, and I think their report reflects that.
We particularly appreciate the focus that the report places
on human rights and accountability, and those are themes that
run throughout the report. I think they do set in some respects
a framework for what they call a new beginning, but certainly a
moving forward in a very problematic area.
At the same time, we also were quite disappointed, as many
of you have expressed, that the Commission in its report failed
to grapple directly with the issue of impunity and of past
violations, and I think in some respects the answer that Mr.
Patten just gave with respect to that is in a sense presenting
a paradigm that is not necessarily the only one. I don't think
anybody here, or certainly we didn't expect that the Commission
on Policing would undertake to investigate all of the past
crimes of the last 30 years.
What we had hoped and what I think all of us now face is
the prospect of dealing with what has really become a cycle of
impunity and for dealing with the reality that the RUC is not
at a new beginning. It has 11,000 or 12,000 people on active
service, many of whom have been with the force for a long time,
and too many of whom have been responsible for grave violations
of human rights. The question is, what do you get to get some
change.
Our view has been and continues to be that there has to be
a targeted focus on specific egregious cases. I am here this
morning in part to again reiterate our concerns about two of
those cases, the Patrick Finucane and Rosemary Nelson cases,
and then I just want to say a couple of words in closing.
I am going to defer to Michael on the Patrick Finucane
case, except to say that for 10 years now we have followed and
been very actively involved in that case. We are not satisfied
or convinced that a third Stevens inquiry or participation is
the way to address that. We would here again call and urge you
to call for an independent inquiry. There are too many
different strands and sensitivities and there is a need to get
at the truth, both in terms of who ordered the killing, who
knew about it, and who covered it up.
With respect to the Rosemary Nelson case, you all had an
opportunity to see and hear her last year, almost a year to the
day, and she came and testified that basically she was at risk
and that she was receiving, on a regular basis, threats;
threats delivered through her clients by members of the police.
Here we sit a year later, and we ask ourselves what is
being done to address not only her horrible murder last March,
but also what is being done to investigate the climate and the
official tolerance of the kind of threats that in some way set
an environment in which the horrible murder happened.
We have been troubled by the way that investigation has
proceeded. We are now 6 months into the investigation of the
Rosemary Nelson murder. A British policeman named Colin Port
has been assigned as the officer in charge. He reports directly
to Ronnie Flanagan, the chief constable of the RUC. His people
are in Lurgan, an RUC office using RUC computers with RUC
investigators part of that investigation.
We have--I have as part of the written submission that I
have made, and I hope that you will make it part of the record,
an exchange of correspondence with Mo Mowlam about the
structure of that investigation, again in our view critically
flawed. There needs to be a thoroughly independent
investigation, with no participation of the RUC except where
the person in charge deems it absolutely essential and
indispensable.
We feel that there are people who may have information
about the Rosemary Nelson murder who are unwilling or reluctant
to come forward because their perception is that this is just
another RUC investigation that will go nowhere.
Two last comments. One thing in a broader sense that
Maurice Hayes said that I agree with, a number of the
recommendations in the Patten Commission report are managerial
in tone and I think are very good recommendations with respect
to training and structure. My colleagues on the next panel will
deal with some of those in detail.
I would just make one general observation, which is that
any manager has got to be thinking, once a plan, once a broad
framework is in place, what is the operational plan to
implement it. Timing, dollars or pounds, what is it going to
take to do it practically? That is a problem here.
Second, there has to be a change in institutional culture,
and I would say as a first element of that, coming back to the
Nelson and the Finucane cases, there has to be a suggestion
that the way things are in the future is fundamentally
different than the way that they have been in the past. This
report from the Patten Commission doesn't necessarily lead us
there, and I think it is incumbent upon all of us to press the
British Government and others to make sure that message is
sent.
Finally, there needs to be a leadership of any institution
internally that make those things happen. I think all of us
have to ask ourselves, and British authorities have to ask
themselves, is the current leadership of the RUC prepared
fundamentally to take on the enormous task of making this plan,
this framework of the Patten Commission operational? I question
that. It seems to me that all of us have to be asking those
questions.
Externally there are a number of things not in place, or at
least proposed in the report, that aren't in place. An
ombudsman, it is a good suggestion and there is no ombudsman.
The operational capacity, this transitional Oversight
Commissioner, it has to be someone strong, with a lot of
authority. A police board.
There are a number of--this is a blueprint with a lot of
interesting ideas. I think we ought to push it to the limit. We
ought to view it as a package, but we ought to view it as the
beginning of the beginning and recognize now that the tough
work of implementation begins, and I am for one not convinced
that the British Government is going to operationalize this in
a way that is going to really create a new beginning in terms
of human rights.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. Those submissions will be made a part
of the record, without objection.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Posner appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Smith. Mr. Finucane.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL FINUCANE, SON OF PATRICK FINUCANE, SLAIN
DEFENSE ATTORNEY
Mr. Finucane. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to
preface my remarks by offering my sincere thanks on behalf of
myself and my family for the invitation to speak today.
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, my fellow speakers,
ladies and gentlemen, I am Michael Finucane, the eldest son of
Pat Finucane, the defense lawyer murdered in 1989. I testified
before this Committee 2 years ago and I openly accused the
British Government of ordering and arranging the murder of my
father. I pointed to the powerful motivation of the British
Government in silencing the embarrassing revelations of my
father's human rights work. I listed the names of prominent
international organizations that had up until then supported my
family's call for a full, independent inquiry into his murder.
Upon hearing the accusations I had to make and the proof I
had to offer, this Committee immediately pledged its support to
my family's call for an independent inquiry. Many others have
done the same since, including the Irish Government, the United
Nations Special Rapporteur, Param Cumaraswamy, who has also
been a witness before this Committee, the Law Society of
Ireland, the Law Society of Northern Ireland, the Bar Council
of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and England and Wales.
On February 12, this year, a petition was published in
several national newspapers marking the 10th anniversary of my
Father's death. It was signed by over 1,300 lawyers worldwide,
clearly showing to the British Government an unprecedented
level of international support for an independent inquiry into
his murder.
On the same day, my family and I presented a confidential
report compiled by the London-based NGO British Irish Rights
Watch to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo
Mowlam. This report was based in part on classified information
from British intelligence files. It clearly showed that
military intelligence had clear advance knowledge of the plot
to assassinate my father and that their agent, Brian Nelson,
aided the assassins without hindrance.
I would very much like to be able to tell this Committee
that all of these efforts and pledges of support have led to
the establishment of an independent public inquiry. They have
not. In the last 12 months, the British Government has ignored
not only the calls of this Committee, but has also dismissed a
second report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur and has
refused to respond to the report of British Irish Rights Watch.
Added to this are the events that have unfolded in Northern
Ireland in the last number of months, events disclosing highly
sinister practices on the part of the RUC and the Director of
Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland in relation to the
prosecution of those responsible for murdering my father.
In March 1999, the chief constable of the RUC, Ronnie
Flanagan, recalled John Stevens to Northern Ireland. Mr.
Stevens was the English police officer who first investigated
collusion between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries, and he
had been instructed by the chief constable to reopen my
father's murder investigation.
The chief constable is on record as having stated that
previous investigations by Mr. Stevens had completely
exonerated the RUC from any illegal involvement in the murder
of my father. Mr. Stevens, however, began his duties by opening
an initial press conference with the statement that he had
never before investigated the case of Patrick Finucane, nor had
he been asked to do so.
What, then, is the truth of this matter? Is the chief
constable of the RUC lying about the investigation into my
father's murder? Is he aware of wrongdoing or illegality on the
part of his officers and has he sought to cover it up?
On June 23rd this year, Mr. Stevens charged a man named
William Alfred Stobie with my father's murder. The first thing
that Stobie said when formally charged was ``not guilty of the
charge that you have put to me tonight. At the time I was a
police informer for RUC-Special Branch. On the night of the
death of Patrick Finucane, I informed Special Branch on two
occasions by telephone of a person who was to be shot. I did
not know at the time of the person who was to be shot.'' .
When Stobie first appeared in court, his lawyer stated that
his client was a paid Crown agent from 1987 until 1990 and that
he gave the RUC information on two occasions before my father's
murder which was not acted upon. In addition, Stobie's lawyer
claimed that ``as a result of this information at another trial
involving William Stobie on firearms charges in 1991, the Crown
offered no evidence and a finding of not guilty was entered on
both counts. My instructions are that the bulk of the evidence
here today has been known to the authorities for almost 10
years.'' .
Mr. Stobie has appeared before the courts on a number of
occasions since then. More information has come to light
showing that what his lawyer said in court is absolutely true.
In 1990, Mr. Stobie was charged with the possession of
firearms found in his home. I can say from my personal legal
experience that the evidence against him would have convicted
any other person and that this was the logical outcome here.
However, in this case, the charges were dropped because Stobie
threatened to expose his role as an RUC agent. The chief
prosecutor in this case, Jeffrey Foote, QC, is now a judge
serving on the county court bench in Northern Ireland.
It has also emerged that Mr. Stobie confessed to his role
in my father's murder while in police custody in 1990 and even
the very existence of this confession was denied as recently as
the 3rd of August this year. At a court hearing on that day, it
was stated that the DPP had decided not to prosecute Stobie for
my father's murder due to a lack of evidence. It was claimed
that the evidence against him consisted solely of notes taken
by a journalist during an interview in 1990 which until now had
not been stated in evidential form capable of being used in a
criminal trial. This decision not to prosecute Mr. Stobie was
specifically stated to have been taken by the DPP's office at
the highest level. This decision was made on the 16th of
January, 1991, 7 days before the firearms charges were dropped
against him.
The only reason my family are aware that Mr. Stobie made a
confession is because it emerged at a later court hearing this
year. The RUC are currently seeking to compel another
journalist who interviewed Mr. Stobie in 1990 to hand over his
notes of interview. Mr. Ed Moloney, the journalist concerned,
has refused to do so and has cited journalistic privilege. It
was during a court hearing on this issue that an RUC chief
inspector stated William Stobie had admitted supplying the
weapons in my father's murder and recovering them after the
killing. Stobie admitted this in police custody in 1990. He
also admitted that he was a Special Branch agent.
All of these matters raise important questions for the
various institutions and individuals concerned. Why was William
Stobie not charged in 1990 when a confession was on record and
in the hands of the RUC? Why did it take the recall of John
Stevens, 9 years later, before charges were proffered?
Furthermore, why did the DPP decide at the highest level not to
prosecute Stobie, given the existence of a confession? Why was
the very existence of this confession denied in court on August
3 this year?
Is the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions
complicity in concealing wrongdoing by members of the RUC as
the chief constable Ronnie Flanagan has done? RUC officers have
engaged in a persistent campaign of hostility, intimidation,
and abuse of defense lawyers in Northern Ireland. They have
uttered death threats against many lawyers, two of whom have
been assassinated. None have been brought to account for their
actions.
This is the glaring omission in the report of the Patten
Commission and the fundamental error. While the report contains
many welcomed proposals for a human rights-based police service
with primary responsibility for the whole community, it shies
away from key issues that quite simply must be addressed if the
new police service as a whole is to succeed.
The Commission said they had no mandate to do so. I
respectfully disagree. In the terms of reference of the
Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, it is
contained that the Commission should focus on policing issues
but if it identifies other aspects of the criminal justice
system relevant to its work on policing, including the role of
the police in prosecution, then it should draw the attention of
the government to those matters.
Surely the Commission does not suggest that the persistent
and credible concerns concerning RUC threats and harassment of
defense lawyers is not relevant to its work. The RUC has
labeled lawyers as the enemy and has engaged in a systematic
campaign to undermine their role. They have actively pursued a
course that has put the lives of all defense lawyers at risk
and they have colluded with those who are prepared to murder
them. At the very least, any new service needs to be retrained
in its approach toward dealing with defense lawyers who are,
after all, simply carrying out the function which it is their
duty to do. The lawyer who represents William Stobie, Joe Rice,
stated to the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in 1992 that
if a lawyer rocks the boat too much, then like Patrick
Finucane, he or she will be in trouble.
Threats have continually been made for many years by RUC
officers against defense lawyers. As far back as 1984, a client
of my father's was told, ``Finucane would be like you, he'd be
f--------' blown away.''
In 1988, Amnesty International recorded a statement from a
man who been badly beaten while in RUC custody and who was
represented by my father. He said that the RUC told him, it
would be better if he, Patrick Finucane, were dead rather than
defending the likes of you.
Five weeks before my father was murdered, another man was
told by an RUC officer that his solicitor was working for the
IRA and would meet his end also. He asked me to give Mr.
Finucane a message from him. He told me to tell him that he is
a thug in a suit, a person trying to let on that he is doing
his job, and that he, like every other fenian bastard, would
meet his end.
These threats had continued unabated for so many years that
many lawyers, my father included, came to view them as an
occupational hazard. Now, when an RUC officer tells a detained
person that his lawyer will be shot, that lawyer must regard
the threat as real. Lawyers are also members of the community
that the Patten report seeks to serve, and as such they are
entitled to protection from such individuals. The reality that
lawyers must live with is that, notwithstanding the fact that
their lives are at risk from paramilitaries, they are also at
risk from the RUC.
These issues are crucial. They are crucial because two very
courageous lawyers have paid with their lives. Despite many
submissions that specifically highlighted the existence of
collusion in the murders of both my father and Rosemary Nelson,
they are not addressed in any way in the report of the Patten
Commission. The report of the Patten Commission makes specific
mention, time and again, of RUC officers who were killed during
their period of service and how their families should now be
accommodated. But it does not recommend anything for the
benefit of those who have been murdered either by the RUC or
with the assistance and collusion of the RUC. Why is this? Does
the report seek to distinguish between classes of victims?
The report also ignores the fact that the very officers who
engaged in activities of intimidation and abuse are still
serving with the RUC. Furthermore, the report proposes no
mechanism for ridding the new police service of these officers.
It does not even recommend that they should account for their
years of serial abuse of human rights. I can categorically
state that given the Patten report's absence of recommendations
in this area, given the continued absence of effective
government proposals, and given a complete lack of any
commitment to stringent measures to deal with this problem,
defense lawyers in Northern Ireland are still in trouble, the
worst kind of trouble, their very lives are on the line.
In this very chamber 1 year ago, I sat in the audience and
listened to a most remarkable lady, Rosemary Nelson, utter the
now haunting words ``No lawyer can forget what happened to Pat
Finucane.'' Rosemary said she looked forward to a day when her
role as a professional lawyer would be respected, and where she
could carry out her duties without hindrance or intimidation.
She did not live to see that day.
On March 15 this year, Rosemary Nelson was murdered. She
had spoken publicly of the threats to her life that she had
been forced to learn to cope with, hoping that by publicly
highlighting the regime targeted against her, she could somehow
protect herself and her family from harm. In identical
circumstances to those of my father, she became a target, and
consequently a victim.
To date, no one has been charged with her murder. The
political circus that took place over simply trying to ensure
that independent police personnel would investigate her murder
speaks volumes about how little the British Government values
the lives of people who are murdered for simply doing their
job.
Is this to be always the way that the State and the police
in Northern Ireland, by any name, deal with lawyers who ask
uncomfortable questions, who take on contentious cases, who
seek to uphold the rights of all people without fear or favor?
The RUC as a police force--and I use the word ``force''
very deliberately--bears total responsibility for the sins of
its past. Whether by act or omission, each and every member of
the force must face up to the fact that they bear some
responsibility for what has happened. The victims of atrocities
cannot deny nor forget what happened. Indeed, the generosity of
spirit of many fortunate victims of RUC collusion puts those
who are responsible to shame. These people are prepared to work
hard for the future of Northern Ireland, both for their own
sake and the sake of future generations. But they should not be
asked to simply swallow their pain, they should not be asked to
erase the memory of those they have lost, and they should not
be asked to watch as those who have abused and killed and
conspired to kill them and their loved ones are ushered into a
new police service without being asked to render so much as an
apology.
If we are truly to see a new police service for all of the
community in Northern Ireland, then there must be courage
underlying our convictions. We must be able to turn to those
who are not capable of participating in a new police service
based on tolerance and respect for others, and tell them that
they have no place.
I do not deny that this is a difficult task. But in doing
what must be done, we are acknowledging that wrongdoing of the
most heinous kind has taken place and that there are some acts
which cannot go unpunished. The dead have paid the ultimate
price. I believe it is right and proper that those responsible
should not escape without payment of any kind.
I thank you very much.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much, Mr. Finucane, for your
excellent testimony. It was very comprehensive, very
persuasive.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Finucane appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Smith. Mr. Gilman has to leave, but did want to ask a
question or two.
Mr. Gilman. I want to thank Mr. Posner and Mr. Finucane for
coming before our Committee and giving their valuable
testimony.
Mr. Posner, what one thing can be done about the British
inquiry into Rosemary Nelson's death truly independent so we
all can have some confidence in its conclusion?
Mr. Posner. I think the most important thing is to set up
an independent inquiry into the murder. Right now, you have a
hybrid with a British police officer, Colin Port, directing a
mix of British and Northern Ireland RUC officials, and
basically it taints the process.
Mr. Gilman. Has a request of that nature been made?
Mr. Posner. Repeatedly.
Mr. Gilman. To whom?
Mr. Posner. Attached to my testimony are a couple of
letters that we have sent to Mo Mowlam. We have met with her.
Mr. Gilman. Has she responded to that kind of request?
Mr. Posner. The responses have been thus far that they are
moving in the direction of trying to create safeguards within
the current process, but we have not had a satisfactory
response.
Mr. Gilman. Mr. Finucane, the weapon used to kill your
father was a British army revolver, I believe, and which
initially was contended was stolen. In light of recent
revelations of collusion with the security services, do you
still believe or have any new evidence that that weapon was in
fact stolen?
Mr. Finucane. Absolutely. The individual who stole the
weapon from police barracks was prosecuted for the theft and
sentenced to I think a term of 2 years imprisonment.
Mr. Gilman. Did he admit the use of that weapon and that he
stole the weapon?
Mr. Finucane. No. The individual who stole the weapon was
serving in the Ulster Defense Regiment, a part-time sort of
civilian militia which assisted the RUC in security operations.
He was simply prosecuted for the theft of the weapon, and the
weapon itself was never recovered. But it is clear, given the
records of the weapon----
Mr. Gilman. How did the killer obtain that weapon?
Mr. Finucane. It was passed to loyalist paramilitaries
presumably by the person who stole it. But the reason that it
could be identified as a State-held weapon was because of the
ballistic markings on the bullets.
Mr. Gilman. Which paramilitary was it given to?
Mr. Finucane. It was given to the Ulster Freedom Fighters.
Mr. Gilman. I'm sorry?
Mr. Finucane. The Ulster Freedom Fighters. They are, and
have been for many years, the paramilitary wing of an
organization called the Ulster Defense Association, which is
also now proscribed.
Mr. Gilman. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I regret I
have to go on to another hearing and I want to thank you both
for being here today.
Mr. Smith. Because the clock ran out, I would like to show
some small courtesy to those members who were not able to ask
questions in the last panel, and so we will go to them first.
Mr. Payne.
Mr. Payne. Thank you very much, Mr. Smith, and let me once
again commend you for this fourth in a series of hearings that
you've had. I think that with the persistence that you have
shown on this, hopefully we will see some changes. We have
already seen some come about, but we have a long way to go.
Unfortunately, Mr. Patten had to leave. I wanted to just
ask him again about making an analogy between an investigation
of misconduct by police as a witch hunt. I think a witch hunt
is not an investigation of a police department. If the
connotation of an investigation by internal or external forces
of the RUC is in his mind a witch hunt, I just wanted to put
that on the record.
Also, regarding the statement that he made regarding the
use of, as he calls it, plastic baton rounds, or plastic
bullets, I have legislation asking for a ban on the manufacture
of plastic bullets in the U.S. and urging the RUC to cease
using them.
I keep one of these on my desk, and each time we have a
hearing I just bring it along, because he says there is no
other alternative other than to simply use bullets or this.
These have killed 17 people and when they hit young people,
they just rip eyes out of their head and tear their bodies
apart, sometimes using so many that the guns are too hot to
hold. That is wrong and it is unnecessary and I still cannot
understand why there is a resistance to stop using these lethal
weapons as a means of crowd control.
Let me just say that in addition, I think to your
investigation, the investigation of your father's death, I
think that Bloody Sunday in 1972 needs to be reopened. That is
something that is another whitewash of the government.
Finally, I just want to say that I agree with other
speakers that the RUC needs to be disbanded totally. It makes
no sense to have so many technical changes. I can use the
situation in Haiti. I was there 2 weeks ago. They had a police
department in Port-Au-Prince run by a member of the military, a
fellow named Francois Mishon. The army did the rest of the
policing run by General Raoul Cedras. What they did in Haiti
was to disband the army and disband the Port-Au-Prince Police
Department. They have started from scratch with new recruits,
with a brand new police department. Now they are struggling and
they are moving along, but in my opinion, that is what has to
happen to the RUC.
You cannot reform, talking about 10 years from now, 50
percent. How can you have the RUC patrolling in Derry where you
have 90 percent Catholic and you have got a 95 percent
Protestant military? That will never work. So I think that
there are examples of places in other parts of the world that
can be looked at and studied to see how you go about having a
new police unit there.
Finally, there is the tension that is built during the
marching season. I have been down in lower Armagh Road, I have
stayed right on Garvaghy Road 2 years ago, right on the road
itself, my three or four trips there during the marching
season. I think that the Parades Committee does not do the job
that it should do. In the last year, they have tended to
acquiesce, but I am looking toward the future. They refuse to
meet with the community groups as it is in the protocol of the
Parades Committee, and the agitation continually of the
marchers which creates the tension is really something that I
think needs to be restudied carefully by the Parades Committee.
The fact that the tension still remains is something that I
believe is a major issue as we move forward. I have no
questions, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to make those several
statements.
Once again, I commend you and of course Mr. Posner and Mr.
Finucane for coming. Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much.
Mr. Posner. Could I just react to one? The first thing you
said I think is important with respect to the inquiry. Some of
our colleagues are going to talk about the absence of a vetting
procedure and the Commission report. Chairman Smith, you
mentioned it. I think we have to recognize the report is what
it is now. The question is how to move forward.
It seems to me that the most critical element here is you
have to, rather than saying all right, there's this whole big
mass of cases, we have to start somewhere, there has to be
right now at a very early stage here, before things get adrift,
there has to be pressure to say, in the Finucane case, in the
Nelson case, and half a dozen others that we all know, there
has to be a change here. Because if there isn't a change and
there isn't some sense of accountability, personal
accountability, criminal accountability, then you are never
going to get the change culture and you are never going to get
young Catholic kids to decide they want to be part of the
police. All these things are linked together.
But I think the Patten Commission have put together a very
ambitious plan, but a critical element is missing. It is for
us, all of us who are concerned about these issues and
particularly you all, to keep the pressure up, to keep saying
this is too critical a moment to abandon the effort to really
get at accountability. I appreciate your comment.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Delahunt.
Mr. Delahunt. Thank you very much. I appreciate your
testimony today. I was going to ask a question similar to the
statement posed by my colleague from New Jersey, Mr. Payne.
There is much that is positive within the report. I think
we have heard your concerns regarding the vetting process,
regarding individual cases that certainly have great validity
and legitimacy. But my fundamental concern is the pace of the
change. The reality is that we know that the RUC is not going
to be disbanded. That clearly was the conclusion of the
Commission.
But as Mr. Payne pointed out, it has been less than 3 years
since the Haitian National Police have been constituted
absolutely from the beginning. We had the disbanding of the
military. I would suggest that the goals that have been
established, a third within 10 years, are simply not
satisfactory. First, from the perspective of a third, clearly
within 10 years presumably, that will not be reflective of the
community at large. I dare say by then the religious breakdown
will be close to 50 percent. Again I am not suggesting that
these are quotas, and I don't think that is how we should
approach the issue, but if we are going to have a change in the
culture, am I correct in concluding that until there is an
appropriate reflection of the composition, that culture will
never change, or at least the confidence of the community at
large will simply not exist?
He made the analogy with the fact that it took decades in
New York City, but that is an analogy I don't think that really
stands up to close analysis. Here we have a situation where it
is clear that it is a political issue, as Mr. Patten indicated
himself, and that was an issue that was deferred. I think he
described it as really one of the core issues in terms of the
hopes for peace in Northern Ireland.
That certainly wasn't the case in New York City or any
other major American city. So is it really a question of
political will? Is it lack of resources? But that is a concern
that I have. Someone raised the issue, I think it might have
been Chairman Smith, in terms of membership in various orders,
and he drew the analogy with the Order of Hibernians and the
Orange Order. I am sure we don't have to be concerned about
members of the Hibernians in the RUC. There are only about 6
percent Catholics to begin with. I don't know what we can do
about it. But clearly I think 10 years is unacceptable. That
composition and that change which I think is so important in
terms of the confidence of again the community at large, can
occur within a matter of several years if the political will
and the resources that are necessary are available. I would be
interested in your comments.
Mr. Posner. In March I traveled in Northern Ireland with
Robert McGuire, who is a former police commissioner of New
York, and we spent several hours speaking with Mr. Flanagan and
about 20 people in the RUC. We had just this discussion. I
think the thing that we stressed to them, and I believe very
strongly, is that there needs to be a very dramatic shift so
that there is a critical mass within the police that in effect
begins to change the culture. When you talk to people,
Catholics, who are contemplating being in the police, one of
the things they say, and it makes sense, is, ``I don't want to
be the only one,'' or, ``I don't want to be one of a few.'' .
So I agree with you. I think the direction here of the
report is right but it is a very cautious, slow, and I think
too slow approach. I also think, even if you take a more
aggressive approach with numbers, those numbers are going to be
fictitious unless you do change the underlying assumptions of
this force. It is operated almost as an armed force, an army,
more than a police force. It has been unaccountable on a
variety of levels which are spelled out in the report.
Mr. Delahunt. I think that is accurate. The fact that it
has shifted, if you will, to an understanding that it is not an
instrument of the State, but there to protect the civil
liberties and the human rights of each citizen is very
positive; but that, in and of itself, the mission statement is
not going to change until you have implemented it, I believe,
with a force that is more reflective again of the entire
community. But 10 years?
In my previous career, I was the elected chief prosecutor
in the metropolitan Boston area. Given the resources that are
available now and given what hopefully exists in terms of the
political will at least that has been expressed by the British
Government and others, that that 10 years can be reduced to
several years, and it is important now to aggressively recruit
from the Nationals community, from the Catholic community.
Mr. Payne. If the gentleman will yield, the other fallacy
is simply this: If you bring in new people at the bottom, then
those who are members of the RUC at this time will be in
control for the next 5 or 6 decades. They will be pushed up,
they will be in control, and the leadership of the RUC will not
reflect the new people coming in. It cannot work. It will be
the same culture at the top as they move up to the top, as they
bring in new people. They will be controlling all of that. We
have the same situation as some other police units. You have to
just disband. I know it is a radical thing, but that is the
only thing, in my opinion, that will truly work.
Mr. Finucane. Mr. Chairman, I would please just like to
add, one of the things Mr. Patten said this morning when
commenting on his report was that the 30 percent composition of
Catholic officers was the outside margin of his projection, it
was the best case scenario and a change of 50 percent, I
assume, coming with a greater influx of female officers, which
are also lacking in the force at the moment.
But the problem here is that if you have new officers being
recruited, even aggressively recruited from Catholic and
Nationalist areas, they are going to be instructed by the older
officers, who are not officers who have practiced their trade,
as it were, with any thoughts of human rights. In fact, it has
been completely the opposite. It is my view that what they will
be passing on is not techniques of how to respect other people
and to achieve results through tolerance and understanding, but
basically to instruct people as to what they can get away with.
Past case evidence has shown that they are capable of getting
away with everything from murder down.
I would also like to say that the change in the RUC is not
just a question of political will. It has to happen anyway,
from simple kinds of efficiency--the force is unworkable--right
down to fundamental distrust and rejection by large sections of
the community where there has to be root and branch reform at
every level.
There also needs to be an external catalyst. It is my view
that an independent inquiry into harassment of lawyers on the
murders of my father and Rosemary Nelson could very well
provide that catalyst. Over the last 10 years, it has always
been the approach of my family when seeking support, not to
overtly try to persuade persons in influential positions, but
simply to present them with the evidence. Without exception,
they have all come back with exactly the same conclusions that
we have reached.
Given that that is the case and given you really can't go
any further, if I may be slightly sycophantic for a second,
than Congress or the U.N. In seeking support, and we have got
the support of both those institutions, I see no reason why the
British Government, if they don't want to take my word for it
or my family's word for it, then they really ought to take the
word of this institution or the United Nations and institute an
inquiry. Because not only will it deal with the problem and
bring to light all of the facts that are emerging piecemeal,
but it will have a tumultuous effect on the confidence of
Nationalists in the will of the State to reform its own
institutions and to face up to the wrongdoing that has been
done.
That need not necessarily involve criminal prosecutions,
but the acknowledgment has to be there, as was seen in the
truth and reconciliation hearings in South Africa.
Mr. Smith. Let me just ask you, you answered my earlier
questions of Commissioner Patten and Senator Hayes on the whole
issue of vetting. Frankly, as I read the report, and I read it
twice, once with a pen in my hand, it was filled with markings,
and the next time with a yellow highlighter. I seemed to
underline all the same things. It is the glaring omissions as
well, as you have pointed out so well, that are probably the
most troubling. Why weren't defense attorneys included? That is
an issue that we have raised, we have had resolutions passed in
Congress, we have had linked it to RUC training with the FBI, a
proposal which is still in conference with the Senate. I had
offered that. It was a bipartisan effort. Mr. King and I, and
many of us were behind that, making future training contingent
on whether or not there is an independent inquiry into Patrick
Finucane's murder and Rosemary Nelson's. Yet we still seem
stuck. Are they afraid as to where it might go in terms of how
high into the structure?
I was struck by Senator Hayes's comment about being forward
thinking. I tried to convey back to him, as you probably heard,
that in order to go forward, you need to look back. Past is
prologue. If you have, as they call it in the report, ``bad
apples'' within the system, particularly if they are in the
Special Branch in a higher proportion than anywhere else,
simply offering a golden parachute, which is suggested here,
might get the good people to leave, while the others who cling
to power and to abuse of power are perhaps more likely to stay
without a vetting process.
I am glad, Mr. Payne pointed out, as I tried to do at the
moment it was mentioned by Mr. Patten, that to suggest in any
way, shape, or form that this is a witch hunt is nonsensical.
This is an effort, as we have in our own police forces here in
the United States, to track down those who abuse, those who
beat, those who do horrific things against innocent people, or
even accused people who may end up being convicted. They still
are entitled to due process rights as well as an absolute
freedom from beatings and torture and all the other things that
are employed.
These missing elements really concern me. As I said to the
British Ambassador when we met several weeks ago, which was the
genesis of this hearing when we made the request that
Commissioner Patten testify, I am also concerned about this
being the high bar or a ceiling, and then as we go through the
process in the Parliament, things get left out, things don't
get included in the legislation; and then everyone says we have
done that, we have got the T-shirt, and we move on. That would
be a major, major problem.
I can assure you, Mr. Finucane, that we will be ever
vigilant on this Committee, we will be bipartisan in to keeping
the call for an independent inquiry into your father's death
alive. We will increasingly link it to other things, even as
this process goes forward, because you cannot move forward if
you still have this terrible taint and these horrible things in
the background.
It reminds me of a cancer, if I may use a health metaphor.
If you don't get it all, it comes back to haunt you. No matter
how good the operating surgeon is, he has got to be sure to get
it all; then to pile on with the chemotherapy and radioactive
efforts to try to kill it.
We need to have a vetting process that gets at this, those
so-called bad apples, as they continually refer to them as, and
do it once and for all. There is international precedent for
it. I tried to convey that to Commissioner Patten. We will
continue to do so, because again it is a serious omission. But
why was it left out? Was it for consensus purposes?
Mr. Posner. I am not privy to the internal conversations,
but it was clearly a lot of inferences in the report that were
never explicitly said. The references to accountability
throughout the report I think reflect the fact that this has
been a largely unaccountable institution on every level. It is
not just human rights cases. It has been a bloated, inefficient
and unaccountable institution.
We were given a report by the chief constable. In 1997,
there were 5,500 complaints made to the police about their
force. That year, one person was dismissed from the force--
5,500 complaints. We asked, How could that be. They said, We
have an excellent force. Well, the answer is there is no
internal discipline. We have got to assume here that the Patten
Commission knew that and that the code of accountability says
there has to be some internal process to change that. It is not
going to happen unless there is external pressure. That is why
we need an ombudsman, we need this Oversight Commissioner to be
tough and strong.
It is critical for you, Congressman, and others here to
keep putting the pressure on because this is going to be a hard
fight.
Mr. Smith. I was struck by the comment--Mr. Finucane, did
you want to comment?
Mr. Finucane. Just to say, Mr. Patten said this morning
that you couldn't really cherry-pick the report. I agree. I
also agree with him when he says it hangs together very well.
But I must also, with some disappointment, agree with an
earlier comment that was made here today, that you now have to
take the report as it is. The fact is, no vetting mechanism has
been proposed. Therefore, there has to be, unless the
recommendations are augmented in Parliament, then there has to
be an external mechanism. Certainly one thing that I believe is
crucial, and not just for my own or my family's purposes, is
clearing up this issue of harassment of defense lawyers and
collusion as a whole, because in relation to the reasons why
the Patten Commission perhaps didn't address this is because,
yes, it goes to the very top, it goes right through everything.
On the one hand, you have an argument that every single person
in Northern Ireland killed by Loyalists was probably the victim
of collusion, to the other end of the spectrum, where the
argument is that perhaps not all persons were victims of
collusion, or their killings involved collusion but there were
very many people who were specifically targeted by the
government and the RUC to be removed because they were
undesirables. Those are the spectrums of the argument:
everybody or a few selective individuals. So it exists. It is
undeniable that it exists.
While the RUC personnel and the intelligence personnel were
using this network, there was a network in place. I don't think
the Patten Commission were prepared to take that on quite
simply.
Mr. Smith. In a sense, they have cherry-picked the
fundamental issue. They are asking that the report not be
cherry-picked, but they have left aside some of the key issues
that should have been addressed.
Plastic baton rounds, according to the report, were fired
56,000 times, resulting in, according to their numbers, 16
deaths, although I often hear 17 deaths and 615 injuries.
Interestingly, it is pointed out in the report that they are
available for use in other UK police services. Although there
have been some close calls, it continues, they have never
actually been used. Fifty-six thousand times they have been
used in the north of Ireland, never been used anywhere else. It
does raise an issue almost like you said, Mr. Posner, about
only one police officer paying a consequence for abusive
behavior.
How do you respond to the comments that Mr. Patten made
earlier, that rather than using live rounds, this is something
that his Commission has concluded should still be available for
use?
Mr. Posner. I know that Jane Winter is going to speak to
this directly. We recommended in our submission to the Patten
Commission that plastic bullets be eliminated. We did that
after talking to a number of police people, including some of
the people who run crowd control for the New York City police,
and they said, very simply, when you pose this as an option,
then these are going to be used a lot more frequently and a lot
less discriminantly, and there are going to be the kinds of
eyes taken out and killings that we have seen.
So I think you can say, yeah, let's tighten up the use, but
in reality they shouldn't be used at all. They are not used
anywhere else in Western Europe, they are not used here. There
are alternatives to crowd control. This is about crowd control
in very dangerous situations. Let's not minimize it, but at the
same time let's recognize that police deal with dangerous
crowds all over the world and they don't use plastic bullets.
Mr. Finucane. I would echo those comments very strongly and
also point to the fact that the very name of the weapon,
plastic bullet, really ought to be off the landscape in
Northern Ireland once and for all, because not only is it
capable of inflicting the injury that we have seen but it
carries a very haunting ring for just about everybody. It is a
cross-community issue, because they have been used against both
communities. They quite simply need to be eradicated. There are
alternatives. Those alternatives ought to be used.
There are crowd control--Mr. Patten--the report itself
takes a lot of guidance from police practice in Britain, while
police forces in Britain have to deal with crowd control
situations, too, and they don't deploy plastic bullets or PBR's
or whatever they want to call them in Britain. So they
shouldn't be deployed in Northern Ireland.
Mr. Smith. I was struck in reading the report, the
recommendation is to close the three detention centers but not
to lift the powers that are vested in the police that make
those centers infamous. Do you think that was some kind of
compromise on the Commission's part? The statement, like I said
in my opening comments, looks good on its face about emergency
powers, but then in parentheses, they almost carte blanche
suggest that well, let's just keep records and see what
Parliament does.
Mr. Posner. Again, I know one of our colleagues is going to
speak to this in a few moments, but I think unanimously the
human rights groups that made submissions to the Commission
said the Commission ought to call for an end of emergency
powers, emergency legislation. It is part of the framework that
allows the police to operate as an army. If you are going to
say this is a normal situation, a situation where law and
rights prevail, then you operate according to law and it ought
not to be emergency law. I think it is a missed opportunity.
Mr. Crowley. Mr. Chairman, just some housekeeping. Not
being a Member of the Subcommittee, I just would ask unanimous
consent to have my opening statement and questions entered into
the record.
Mr. Smith. Without objection.
Mr. Crowley. Thank you.
Let me thank you, first of all, for holding this
Subcommittee hearing today. I am honored to be in the presence
of the son of Patrick Finucane. I didn't have the opportunity
to meet your father but I feel as though I have known him for
many years, having been involved in the issue of Northern
Ireland, first in the State legislature of New York and now
here in Congress.
Let me just make one other point about the cherry-picking
issue again. I don't think a report of this magnitude, so
detailed and in depth in the reconstruction of the Royal Ulster
Constabulary could go without the expression of legitimate
concerns by all sides, and that means Unionists, Loyalists,
Catholic, Protestant and Nationalist.
With all respect to Mr. Patten, I think this was a
difficult task. I don't think this was an easy job to begin
with. I didn't mean to be flippant by any means, and time was
short, in making reference to the fact that--I made note of 175
recommendations tantamount, in essence, of totally
reconstructing the RUC without actually stating that--without
actually going back to the drawing board in ways that have been
accomplished in other regions like Haiti and other countries in
the world. I believe that this report is a beginning, as was
mentioned earlier by Chairman Smith.
I do think, though, that in order for there to really be
peace with justice in the north of Ireland, vetting will have
to be a component at some point. Whether it comes about because
of criticism in this report, at some point in the history of
Northern Ireland, vetting will have to be addressed. Truth and
reconciliation will have to be addressed. It is unfortunate
that it was not in this report. I am hopeful that in the future
that it will happen.
In light of the fact that I have just read The Committee,
and again a book that has not gone without its criticisms,
aside from your father's murder, there are a number of murders
that are mentioned in that book, one of a police officer in the
north of Ireland who was executed apparently, supposedly, by
members of the RUC, his brothers and sisters whom he worked
with on a daily basis, solely because he was Roman Catholic,
presumably of the Nationalist community.
Until individuals of that character and nature are rooted
out of the police force in the north of Ireland, it will not be
a legitimate police force.
I will add again, Commissioner Patten made reference to the
fact that we, a number of Members on this panel and this
Committee have problems with the RUC working closely with the
Garda. I myself was outspoken when the PBA of the New York City
Police Department invited the Garda to a boxing match, and the
Garda in turn invited the members of the RUC to participate in
that match. I was critical and was attacked by members of the
RUC for not being sensitive to what they were trying to do in
bridging the police forces.
When I countered that I believe that it is an illegitimate
police force and we should not be, in this country,
legitimatizing them. I really believe that is what they are
trying to do, to make themselves a legitimate force by
participating in these charitable events, to put a rosier
picture on their past, I don't think they can do that simply by
boxing, but I would not be a part of that, nor Mr. King nor Mr.
Smith.
I come from New York City. I come from a police department
that has known problems throughout its history, quite frankly;
none, more recently, than we have seen in the Bronx this year
and last year. We in New York City are not above saying that we
have problems with our police department. We can argue whether
it is enough. We do have a civilian complaint review board. We
have a process by which the police department is investigated
both within and outside the department.
It is just incredible that that doesn't exist in Northern
Ireland to the degree it ought to, given the fact that there is
such a divide within that province. It is just incredible and
unconscionable that it is not being moved forward at this point
in time.
I want to thank, again, Chairman Smith and I want to thank
you both for your testimony today.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Crowley appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Smith. We are joined by Congressman Kucinich from Ohio,
who is not a Member of this Committee but is very interested in
these issues and once was a Member of the Committee.
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much, Mr. Smith, Mr. Crowley.
Mr. Smith, I have appreciated your longstanding commitment
to human rights all over the world. This hearing continues to
reflect that commitment that you have, a commitment that I
share. In reviewing elements of the report and hearing the
testimony of Mr. Finucane and Mr. Posner, the thing that occurs
to me is that while there is much that is praiseworthy with
respect to advocating human rights-based police service, there
seems to be an inherent contradiction here. That is, as the
report depends for its success on human rights-based police
service, a mechanism for enforcement of those high principles
would rely not simply on hoped-for improvements in the system,
but it seems to me structurally it would rely on a willingness
of this system as we hope to see it evolve to tolerate
challenges to its deficiencies. It is a structural question
here.
Human rights attorneys challenged a system prior to this
kind of a report. Ten years ago, Patrick Finucane met a very
unjust and unfortunate end as a result of challenging a system
that wasn't working and at that point the system hadn't
promised anything. Ten years later, while people are talking
about doing something about this system, Rosemary Nelson was
killed.
Now, it seems to me that unless--that first of all, because
this report ignored the issue of what happened to the attorneys
who were human rights advocates, and because the report does
not recommend any external mechanisms for enforcement, no
matter how well-intentioned the sentiments may be, the report
is going to have difficulty being able to be effective, it
would seem, because here you have a system where human rights
attorneys and advocates have to worry for their safety; because
that hasn't been addressed, and categorically there is a reason
to wonder if all of this is really going to happen and will
result in an improvement of human rights, which is what the
report says it wants to do.
So the fact that Mr. Posner mentions 5,500 reports, one
person called to accountability, where is the mechanism? There
is an inherent contradiction. I wanted to point that out,
because we all want to see human rights-based police service.
But there has got to be something in this system that tolerates
the calling of where the system falls short, and it is not
there. Unless I missed something, it doesn't seem to be there.
That is where I think this Committee, and the Chair's
insistence on finding vehicles for pressing the issue, is very
important. Your report has some good things, but we want to
make it work.
Mr. Posner. Can I react to that very quickly? I share your
sentiments exactly. It does seem to me that there are some
again almost code phrases in the report that we ought to be
picking up on. One relates to the internal structure and
responsibility of the force and of the chief constable. They
use a phrase here, they say that the chief constable should go
from what he has called operational independence to operational
responsibility. I don't know exactly what those phrases mean.
It is code for something. It suggests he is less independent
than he once was. He has less responsibility, but it is not
spelled out in any concrete way.
I think one of the challenges here is going to be when
there is a lack of responsibility or when something goes wrong,
what happens? Who says what to who and what happens next?
Mr. Kucinich. You could look at it another way; that is,
notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Patten did condemn in very
strong terms the murder of Rosemary Nelson--that has to be
noted for the record again--notwithstanding that, it seems to
me it would be easy to hold up the report to the RUC and say,
``Hey, boys, there's nothing in here.'' .
Mr. Posner. Those are exactly the conversations that we
have to be most afraid of now. Externally, I think the pressure
has got to come from here, it has got to come from the U.N. and
from elsewhere. People have got to say, the proof is in the
pudding. We have to see results. That is really where we are
today.
Mr. Kucinich. We also want to make it possible for
attorneys who want to stand up for human rights now to let them
know that more efforts are going to be made. Human rights
attorneys, it would seem to me, in reading this report,
couldn't take much comfort from the fact that they can keep
doing their work. The report doesn't make it very easy for them
to have some comfort when it doesn't mention that some people
have had to pay with their lives, and it doesn't advocate doing
anything about that.
I don't think anyone could even comprehend the kind of
suffering your family has gone through, but let it be said that
there are those of us on the other side here who want to make
sure that we learn from those tragedies and try to help the
condition improve, so that people's human rights can really be
protected, not just with a report. Thank you.
Mr. Smith. I thank you very much, Mr. Kucinich. Do either
of you have anything to add? Mr. Finucane?
Mr. Finucane. Just in very brief response to Mr. Kucinich's
last comment, I think it is absolutely right that the people
who would probably be most relieved when this report came out
were the people who feared, with good reason, that their jobs
might be on the line. The reason Rosemary Nelson was eventually
murdered was because, within a force that had contempt for the
rule of lawyers and the work that they did and the people that
they represented and the misidentification of lawyers with the
cases that they were working on, was fostered within the
institution as a whole and tacitly condoned by the government,
both in the Northern Ireland office and in Westminster.
If that atmosphere is to be broken and the responsibility
to come down to the individual officer and back up the chain to
the chief constable that on an individual basis we will not
tolerate human rights abuses or abusers, and on that basis it
needs to be made the responsibility of every police service
officer to take human rights as their personal responsibility.
There are many ways that this can be dealt with, both
through peer pressure--and there was a suggestion of immunity
or protection for those who were prepared to come forward and
give details or testimony on that, fellow officers who were
guilty of the most egregious human rights abuses. But the whole
focus here and certainly in terms of defense attorneys and in
terms of human rights abuses as a whole is that these things
must never be allowed to happen again. That was the focus of
certainly my work and the work of everybody else here. Sadly we
couldn't protect Rosemary. But the people who can and should
have protected her are still there. The government that should
have protected her is still in office, and they can't be let
off the hook. They have responsibilities. They said they would
do this. The force, if you believe the public pronouncements,
is prepared and willing to change. Let's call them up on that
and keep the pressure on. Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much.
Mr. Finucane, Mr. Posner, thank you.
I would like to ask our third panel if they would proceed
to the table.
Maggie Beirne has served since 1995 as the Research and
Policy Officer to the Committee on the Administration of
Justice, CAJ, a cross-community group based in Belfast. Before
that, Ms. Byrne worked for 17 years at the International
Secretariat of Amnesty International and was a member of the
Amnesty senior management team.
Julia Hall is Northern Ireland Researcher and Counsel to
Human Rights Watch. Ms. Hall earned her J.D. At the State
University of New York at Buffalo school of law and holds a
certificate of international law from the Hague Academy of
International Law and has been a great source of accurate and
timely information about human rights to this Subcommittee for
years. We do thank her for that.
Jane Winter is the Director of the British Irish Rights
Watch. Prior to her work with that organization, she was the
Project Coordinator for the Public Law Project. Her past
experience includes work on welfare rights, employment and
immigration issues for both the Battersea Law Center and the
Citizens Advice Bureau in the United Kingdom.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Beirne, if you could begin.
STATEMENT OF MAGGIE BEIRNE, COMMITTEE ON THE ADMINISTRATION OF
JUSTICE, BELFAST
Ms. Beirne. Mr. Chairman, I would like to first thank you
for your invitation to testify today. We would also like to
join with many of the other speakers in thanking this Committee
for their excellent scrutiny that it has given to concerns
about human rights in Northern Ireland and the bipartisan
approach that you have taken. The CAJ, as you know, is an
independent human rights organization based in Northern
Ireland. We work across a wide range of human rights and civil
liberties concerns and have been working on policing since
1981.
As early as 1995, CAJ argued for an independent
international Commission to look into future policing in
Northern Ireland, and we worked to ensure that reference to
such a body was included in the Good Friday Agreement. We
welcomed the broad terms of reference given to the Commission
by the Agreement and sought to work constructively with the
Commission as soon as it came into being under the leadership
of Chris Patten.
We were fortunate enough to have secured earlier funding
from the Ford Foundation and others to undertake a major
comparative research project into good policing practice in a
variety of jurisdictions around the world.
The findings arising from that study have underpinned all
our work with the Commission. In fact, we relayed some of those
findings to your Committee earlier this year. We believe that
they have proved useful to the Commission in its work. This
shouldn't be surprising, since we think that the policing
problems in Northern Ireland differ in degree rather than
nature from those faced by many other countries around the
world. In fact, some of those analogies have been already made
this morning.
As you know, the Patten Commission worked for over 15
months, studied well over 2,000 written submissions, held
hundreds of meetings and received personal testimony from a
wide variety of people. CAJ attended many of the meetings and
studied the submissions of the political parties and other key
social partners. What was apparent to us was that despite the
difficulties and disagreement, there was also a surprising
level of consensus across the political divide about key
aspects of the way forward.
In order to buildupon that consensus, we organized a
conference in February of this year which brought together a
very diverse audience of statutory groups, the police,
government bodies, local party politicians, voluntary groups
and community activists across the Republican and Loyalist
communities.
On the basis of those exchanges, we developed a series of
human rights benchmarks for policing change, and we would like
to have those benchmarks read into the record, if that is
acceptable.
Mr. Smith. Without objection, they will be made part of the
record.
Ms. Beirne. Thank you. Those benchmarks go into some more
detail--but as a minimum, we would propose major
recommendations in the area of dealing with under
representation of Catholics, Nationalists, women and ethnic
minorities, issues of accountability to the law, the overhaul
of police training, the creation of a neutral working
environment, the creation of new structures, and developing
greater democratic accountability.
Overall, the whole package of change should be tested
against its ability to deliver policing arrangements, which
would mean that you would never again have to listen to the
testimony you heard this morning from Michael Finucane about
the death of his father, or a case that is very close to you,
that of Rosemary Nelson whom you heard from just last year--and
that we in Northern Ireland never have to experience such
abuses again.
In general terms, we think the Commission has made a very
genuine and constructive effort to meet the difficult task
imposed on it by the Agreement. They have addressed all of the
issues that we have referred to above and put forward many
thoughtful and positive recommendations about the way forward.
Most importantly, they have recognized, as did the Agreement,
that just as human rights must be at the heart of a just and
peaceful society in Northern Ireland, it must be at the heart
of future policing arrangements.
In spite of these positive comments, we still nevertheless
have some important reservations. Other colleagues will refer
to major concerns we all share with regard to the failure of
the Commission to put in place a mechanism to deal with
officers who have committed human rights abuses in the past.
This issue has already been addressed several times this
morning, and Julia Hall will be talking to it directly, but it
is obviously a concern that we share. Also, their failure to
end the use of plastic bullets and, particularly relevant again
to much of the testimony you received this morning, the
Commission's failure to lend its voice to the importance of
defense lawyers being intimidated or even killed in carrying
out their work.
This particular testimony, while sharing the concerns of
those who preceded or will follow us, will concentrate on two
specific issues that perhaps have had less attention in the
debate so far. One is Emergency Powers and the other is
accountability.
Emergency Powers have been a feature of life in Northern
Ireland since the 1920's. The legislation allows the police to
stop and search without reasonable suspicion, initially to hold
detainees for 48 hours and then, with further authorization, up
to a total of 7 days, and to deny access to a solicitor for the
first 48 hours and for periods thereafter. Combining this with
the removal of the right to silence, the removal of the right
to jury trial, the weight which can be placed on confession
evidence alone and the absence, until recently, of video- or
audio taping of interrogations, such powers lead to serious
human rights abuses, including serious ill treatment of
detainees and the abuse and intimidation of defense lawyers.
It is clear that if these abusive powers are not removed,
the risk is very high that officers, even in a new police
service with a new uniform, a new oath and better training, are
likely to continue to abuse human rights. This, anyway, is the
experience around the world, so we have no reason to think that
Northern Ireland would be any different.
Yet in the Policing Commission's report, this fundamental
issue gets two paragraphs. They cite academics McGarry and
O'Leary (John McGarry also testified to you earlier this year)
that much of the dissatisfaction with policing, in both
Loyalist and Republican areas, stems from the use of Emergency
Powers. Our own belief, shared by all the other human rights
organizations present, is that the Commission should have
recommended the immediate repeal of emergency laws, and argued
for a reliance on the ordinary criminal law. Certainly the
logic of their emphasis on international human rights standards
would suggest that frequent U.N. Calls for the repeal of
emergency legislation should have been heeded.
Again to pick up on some of the earlier comments, the
language on respect of rights has to then be explored in terms
of formal recommendations. The failure to make such a
recommendation is all the more inexplicable when looking at the
current security situation in Northern Ireland, which it could
be argued poses a much smaller risk to the average person
living in London or Manchester and probably a lot less than
Washington, D.C.
The second issue I would like to focus on is that of
accountability. Of all the topics tackled, this is probably the
one where Patten responded most effectively to the oft-repeated
concerns of the general public about the need for greater
accountability. There are many positive recommendations.
However, at least two important problems remain. Patten
endorses all the proposals about a more effective complaints
system included in an earlier report by Dr. Hayes and urges
that those findings be implemented. It is clear, therefore,
that the Commission intended that the authorities tackle the
unacceptably high standard of proof required in complaints
against the police. Yet no specific recommendation is made to
this effect, and there is a risk, obviously, if there is no
specific recommendation, that it will be overlooked and that we
won't get a really credible complaint system.
Another concern under the rubric of accountability is the
role that is envisaged for democratic control at the local
level. It appears to us that the recommendation to establish
district policing partnership boards which are merely--and I
quote from the report--advisory, explanatory and consultative,
will have little or no greater powers than their largely
disparaged predecessors.
Despite these concerns and the others raised by my
colleagues, I want to emphasize again that we found much of
great value in the Commission's work.
It is for this reason that this submission will conclude
with a number of specific requests to this congressional
Subcommittee.
Firstly, CAJ believes, along with our human rights
colleagues, that many of these policing changes are long
overdue. Many of them have been urged on the government for
years by various U.N. Bodies and its own independent assessors.
While the Patten report doesn't deliver everything that we had
hoped and indeed think necessary to real change, people
concerned about the protection of human rights certainly cannot
settle for anything less. The Secretary of State has suggested
a period of consultation, and following that there is no excuse
for further delay.
Congress should urge the U.K. Government to move rapidly to
implement the various positive recommendations in Patten's
report.
Second, implementation is everything, as I said in my last
testimony before Congressman Gilman's International Relations
Committee. We argued that Patten's report couldn't be allowed
to gather dust and warmly welcome the proposal to establish an
Oversight Commissioner to report publicly and regularly on
progress achieved. This proposal is all the more important
given the early emphasis placed by the Chief Constable on the
need to implement any eventual changes only as and when the
improving security situation allows it. In fact, the logic of
Patten is that human rights abuses have fed and fueled the
conflict and that human rights protection, and therefore
policing change, must be at the heart of a just and fair
society.
Apart from being important in and of itself, it is this
goal which will most effectively undermine violence. It is
therefore vitally important that Congress continue to keep a
watching brief on developments and monitor closely the process
of implementation.
Third, there will be no or little effective change in
policing if the criminal justice system itself does not change.
If judges continue to be unrepresentative of society as a
whole, if the prosecution system doesn't operate in a
sufficiently transparent and independent way, and if there is a
remarkable predisposition on the part of the judicial system to
always rely on the testimony of police officers, changes
elsewhere will be undermined.
The significance of the criminal justice review, which will
be reporting in a few weeks' time, cannot be overstated. In
this regard I would ask to have read into the record material
from the journalist Ed Moloney in relation to his harassment in
the Pat Finucane case and the role of the Director of Public
Prosecutions. We would ask that Members monitor this case and
the criminal justice review very closely and make
representations to government accordingly.
The U.S. Congress has kindly, particularly in recent years,
devoted much time and energy to the problems of Northern
Ireland. If we have one message to give, it is that your work
isn't over just yet. Peace processes are difficult and
dangerous things, with the ability to fail as well as succeed.
Securing good policing will be a crucial building block for
long-term stability and true peace and justice in Northern
Ireland.
We are moving in the right direction, but continued
vigilance will be necessary if we are to be ultimately
successful. We hope that human rights groups, local as well as
international, can continue to look to you for your support
around our concerns.
On the impending anniversary of Rosemary Nelson's testimony
to this meeting, it seems the least we can all do is commit
ourselves to trying to make sure that the policing problems she
testified about to your Committee are effectively remedied for
the future.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Beirne appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Smith. Ms. Beirne, thank you very much for your
excellent testimony and for the good work that CAJ does.
On my trip to Belfast a couple of years ago, you and Martin
O'Brien and others were extraordinarily helpful in helping us
to understand in our fact-finding mission, the reality as
divorced from the multiple fictions that are out there. I do
thank you for that. The fact that you see Protestants and
Catholics alike, it does not matter, all that you care about is
human rights, just makes your work all the more credible and we
are very grateful for it.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Hall.
STATEMENT OF JULIA HALL, NORTHERN IRELAND RESEARCHER, HUMAN
RIGHTS WATCH
Ms. Hall. Thank you, Chairman Smith, for inviting Human
Rights Watch here again to participate in this very important
meeting. So very much has been said already about vetting in
Northern Ireland's police force, but I will try my best to keep
my comments both relevant and brief.
First let me say that we recognize the enormity of the task
presented to the Patten Commission and that the final report
does indeed contain many progressive proposals for fundamental
change. We are particularly pleased that the Commission
proposes a new human rights- based approach and makes many
recommendations toward that end.
However, Human Rights Watch fears that, in the end, the
Commission may have undermined its own handiwork by failing to
include critical recommendations in the report regarding
accountability mechanisms for past human rights violations
committed by the RUC. As you know from my testimony last April
before the International Affairs Committee, Human Rights Watch
recommended to the Patten Commission that an independent
vetting unit be established to screen out currently serving RUC
officers with poor human rights records. Indeed this was
perhaps the single most important issue in any of the
submissions that Human Rights Watch made to the Commission. We
proposed a model for such a unit and listed primary and
secondary source material that could be evaluated by a vetting
unit for evidence of abusive police conduct. We also
recommended, quite importantly, that all officers enjoy the
full range of procedural safeguards established under
international law to protect their fundamental due process
rights.
One might ask why we proposed such a process. As a matter
of fact, more than one member of the Policing Commission told
us that such a proposal would be politically explosive. Of
course, we understand this. But we believe that Chairman
Patten's stated primary goal of depoliticizing policing, as he
said this morning, should begin from the beginning.
To be frank, most change in Northern Ireland terms is seen
as politically explosive, and while it is important for the
Patten Commission report to be considered on its merits by all
sides of the community, politically expedient positions should
not have been part of the Commission's mandate. If Northern
Ireland is to finally enjoy membership in the community of
peaceful, democratic nations, and indeed take a genuine human
rights-based approach to policing, it must be prepared to
engage in what is an emerging global norm toward international
justice. That is, the people, political leaders, police and the
community at large, must consider embracing the notion that
impunity for human rights violations has no place in a society
governed and policed by democratic principles.
The trend toward international justice, holding accountable
those State actors who have committed egregious human rights
abuses, is illustrated by the Pinochet case, the ongoing work
of the ad hoc tribunals on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda,
and the vetting of the police force in post conflict Bosnia,
upon which our model for vetting in Northern Ireland was itself
based. The message is clear that human rights abusers must be
held accountable, not as a matter of revenge or retribution,
but as a matter of justice. We believe that such accountability
forms the bridge between the past and the future and builds
confidence in new peacetime structures and arrangements.
Human Rights Watch welcomes the Patten Commission's
observations in chapter 5 of the report that proper
accountability for police misconduct has not been achieved in
Northern Ireland. We have argued this point repeatedly with the
RUC, as I know you have, and with the government for a number
of years. The rote response from both law enforcement and
government officials has been that there are numerous
safeguards built into the system and that the RUC already is
the most scrutinized police force in Europe.
We are deeply, deeply disappointed, however, that despite
the unequivocal recognition that the RUC has not been committed
to human rights-based policing in the past and has not been
held accountable for its actions, the Patten Commission makes
no recommendations regarding vetting. A mechanism for
accountability for past human rights violations would lay a
firm foundation for the future policing arrangements that the
Commission has so carefully contemplated. It would send a
strong message that human rights abuse will not be tolerated in
the new service and would have provided a fair mechanism by
which chronic and other violent abusers would be made to answer
for egregious violations committed with impunity.
Interestingly, the Patten Commission readily accepts the
position put forward by Human Rights Watch and many other human
rights groups in the course of the consultation process that
abusive police conduct, tolerated by the RUC as an institution,
has, in fact, occurred in the past, which makes its omission,
the omission of this issue in the report, all the more
striking. I quote very briefly from the Commission's report:
``we are in no doubt that the RUC has had several officers
within its ranks over the years who have abused their position.
Many supporters of the RUC and both serving and retired
officers have spoken to us about 'bad apples.' it is not
satisfactory to suggest, as some people have, that one should
somehow accept that every organization has such bad apples.
They should be dealt with.
``it is not simply individual officers who have been at
fault here. We are not persuaded that the RUC has in the past
had adequate systems in place to monitor and, when necessary,
act upon complaints against officers.'' .
Now, despite such strong and unequivocal language, the
Patten Commission itself fails to provide a mechanism by which
such bad apples can be dealt with, and the RUC can be held
accountable for institutional tolerance, if not outright
complicity, in the Commission of past human rights violations.
In the absence of a screening process to weed out and exclude
those officers with abusive records, the bad apples and the RUC
as an institution are effectively offered a grant of amnesty by
the Patten Commission.
This is unacceptable and it clearly violates the
international norm that every person whose rights have been
violated shall have an effective remedy, notwithstanding that
the violation has been committed by persons acting in an
official capacity. Such a grant of amnesty for past abuses also
violates the international norm that perpetrators of human
rights violations shall be brought to justice.
A profoundly disturbing aspect of the Commission's failure
to provide such an accountability mechanism lies in the naive
assumption that Catholics and Nationalists will join the new
policing service based solely on the promise of forward-looking
arrangements. The commissioners urge the people of Northern
Ireland to forget the past and embark on a fresh start with
respect to policing. Claiming that Northern Ireland voted
overwhelmingly in 1998 to turn its back on the politics of
revenge and retaliation, the Commission confuses retribution
with justice and revenge with upholding the rule of law.
The Patten Commission report claims too much when it
equates approval of the Good Friday Agreement with a desire and
willingness to forget past human rights violations. Indeed,
during the consultation process, commissioners were inundated
by both written submissions and oral testimony offered at
community meetings by people who have suffered violations at
the hands of the RUC and are still seeking effective redress.
If the people of Northern Ireland wanted to forget the
past, they would not have wasted valuable time and emotional
energy informing the Commission that it is justice for
violations suffered that will lay a firm foundation for their
acceptance of any new policing structures and arrangements.
Thus, the Commission has failed to lay the necessary
groundwork for one of its most critical recommendations, that,
and I quote, ``All community leaders, including political party
leaders and local counselors, should take steps to remove all
discouragements to Members of their communities applying to
join the police, and make it a priority to encourage them to
apply.''
We fear that it is highly unlikely, given the evident
requirement of many people that abusive officers be held
accountable, particularly in the Catholic and Nationalist
communities wherein a disproportionate number of such abuses
occurred, that a large segment of the population will ever have
the confidence to join a new policing service that retains
officers responsible for well-documented egregious human rights
violations.
Ms. Hall. I would like to offer very briefly two examples
of how the absence of a screening process could undermine
recommendations made in the policing report. With respect to
the holding centers, Human Rights Watch welcomes the
Commission's recommendation to close them. However, the Patten
Commission fails to acknowledge in any part of the report that
the reason appropriate for closure has been sustained and
gained momentum over the years is that conditions in the
centers, supported by provisions of emergence of legislation,
create the environments conducive to the physical and
psychological abuse of detainees.
The United Nations Committee Against Torture has repeatedly
called for the closure of the holding centers for this very
reason. There is in fact a small cadre of easily identifiable
RUC detectives who have been responsible for conducting abusive
interrogations in the centers for many, many years.
According to the Commission's ``forget the past
philosophy,'' these detectives would now be appointed to serve
in regular police stations where political suspects will be
held after the centers are closed, or perhaps they will be
placed in the general policing population to gain experience at
community policing. They will, in effect, be offered amnesty
for their abusive practice.
It is very difficult to expect potential new recruits to
serve side by side with officers so easily identified as human
rights violators in the holding centers. I would just draw your
attention again to the case of David Adams, a man who was
brutally assaulted in Castlereagh in 1994, and in 1998 he was
given the highest award of damages ever made against the RUC
and just last month we understand that the DPP has called for
no criminal prosecutions for actions that truly amount to
torture.
Now, those officers will have not been critically
prosecuted, have not been disciplined by the RUC, and continue
to serve in posts in the RUC and over other detainees. Under
the Patten formula, we see no way out in terms of their
officers. They are in. They will be included in the new
policing service. They will be given opportunities to, so
called, change and advance, despite what is an egregious,
egregious action against David Adams.
Second, I would just like to point very quickly to the
issue of Special Branch and then close up.
Much could be said about the violations that have occurred
as a result of Special Branch practices. Credible allegations
of collusion with loyalist paramilitaries have consistently
plagued the branch, and the recent startling revelations about
Special Branch complicity in the murder of Patrick Finucane, as
we heard this morning, have simply refueled urgent calls for
the government to establish an independent inquiry into the
killing; yet there is no recommendation in the Patten report
that Special Branch be evaluated to determine past abusive
practices or, more significantly and something that we had
called for, for the branch--for that particular piece of RUC to
be disbanded and for it to be replaced with a more accountable
unit.
This is highly, highly problematic given the controversial
nature of the policing undertaken by Special Branch in the
past.
To close, under the Patten Commission's imperative to
forget the past, the police officers in these examples,
potentially responsible for human rights violations as
egregious as to the prohibition against taking the right to
life and the prohibition against torture, are offered amnesty
for abusive conduct and to remain on active service in the
police. This is an insult to the concept of justice and it
threatens to undermine extremely worthy efforts recommended in
the report.
Therefore, we urge the Patten Commission and the Government
of the U.K. To reconsider--we are truly asking them to do
something quite significant, and that is to reconsider the
consequences of this omission and we urge the Subcommittee and
others with a genuine interest in entrenching the rule of law
into Northern Ireland to advocate urgently for some kind of
mechanism to be included into this report during the
consultation process.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Hall appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much for your testimony and for
the good work that you have done for many years on this.
We do have a vote on the floor. As a matter of fact, we
have four of them. I would like to recess briefly. If you have
to leave, I certainly understand it. It may take as long as
about 35 to 40 minutes before any of us can return, if that is
OK with you, because you have come across from London to be
with us and we do want to hear what you have to say, Ms.
Winter. We will be in temporary recess. If you have to go, we
will submit questions to you in writing.
[Recess.]
Mr. Smith. The Subcommittee will resume its sitting. I want
to apologize for the long delay because of the voting on the
floor, but Ms. Winter, your comments will be disseminated
through the hearing record, and I thank you in advance for your
patience.
STATEMENT OF JANE WINTER, DIRECTOR, BRITISH IRISH RIGHTS WATCH
Ms. Winter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to this
honorable Committee for inviting me to speak today, and
particularly, Mr. Chairman, to you for your consistent concern
about human rights issues in Northern Ireland.
We join with our colleagues in welcoming the Patten report
and its many positive recommendations. However, we also share
the concerns that our colleagues have expressed today.
I would like to concentrate if I may on just one aspect of
the report, which is the use of plastic bullets. I would ask
that the full report that we have submitted be read into the
record.
Mr. Smith. Without objection your full report will be made
a part of the report.
Ms. Winter. British Irish Watch is opposed to the
deployment of plastic bullets because we regard them as a
lethal weapon that should have no place in policing in a
democratic society at the end of the 20th Century.
Rubber bullets were introduced in Northern Ireland in 1970,
and continued to be used until 1975. Plastic bullets were
introduced in 1973. Mr. Payne has already graphically
illustrated the size and weight of plastic bullets which are
made of a much harder substance than rubber bullets. A plastic
bullet fired at 50 yards distance can be fatal or cause very
serious injury. Most plastic bullets are in fact fired at much
closer range, even sometimes at point-blank range, and the
guidelines for their use recommend a minimum distance of only
20 yards.
Problems have occurred with the manufacture and use of
plastic bullets. Batches of them have been found to be too fast
or too heavy for safety, and independent observers have
observed the guns that are used to fire the bullets jamming and
overheating when they are used repeatedly. Although intended as
a non-lethal weapon of riot control, 17 people have died as a
result of the use of rubber and plastic bullets.
Rubber bullets have resulted in 3 deaths, and plastic
bullets in 14. The ratio of deaths to bullets fired shows that
plastic bullets are more than 4 times as deadly as rubber
bullets, even though they were intended to be more safe.
Of the 17 people killed by plastic bullets, there are a
number of startling factors that come to light. All but one of
the victims were Catholic. Nine of the 17 were age 18 or under,
the youngest being only 10 years old. Only 5 of the victims
were aged over 21. The majority of the victims were not
involved in rioting at the time that they were shot. Many of
the victims were shot at much too close a range and were struck
in the head or the upper body in contravention of the
guidelines then in force. Six of the victims did not die
immediately, but lingered for between 1 and 15 days. They are a
horrific weapon.
According to the report of the Patten Commission, 615
people have been injured by plastics bullets since 1981. The
report does not give the origin of this figure but we believe
that it is almost certainly an underestimate.
The fact that the last fatality caused by a plastic bullet
happened in 1989 does not indicate that plastic bullets are
used less often, nor does it mean that they are any safer. A
solicitor in Northern Ireland put in a submission to the Patten
Commission concerning his professional experience of dealing
with cases of injury caused by plastic bullets. By June 1998 he
had settled 17 out of 24 cases arising out of the disturbances
around the marching seasons of 1996 and 1997. None of those
cases went to court, and yet he attained the sum of 428,000
pounds, nearly half a million pounds, in damages for his
clients.
The cases that he represented involved very serious injury,
including two people who had each lost an eye, fractured jaws,
other eye injuries, and injuries to the back, chest, and
abdomen.
The guidelines for plastic bullets say that they should be
fired so as to strike the target in the lower part of the body.
It is obvious that in the majority of these cases, those
guidelines were not followed. Several of the injuries were
life-threatening and have resulted in permanent maiming and
scarring. It is simply a matter of luck that nobody was killed.
In April 1999 a group of five senior doctors published
their findings concerning people who have been injured in a
single week between the 8th and the 14th of July 1996 by
plastic bullets. During that week 8,165 plastic bullets were
fired throughout Northern Ireland. They treated 155 patients
who had sustained between them 172 injuries. Forty-two patients
had to be admitted to hospital, 3 of them to intensive care.
The age of the patients ranged between 14 and 54 years, most of
them being young men.
Those doctors' findings show that at least 39 percent of
the injuries sustained were to the upper part of the body, in
contravention of the guidelines and they were all life-
threatening injuries. So although it is a matter of rejoicing
that nobody has been killed since 1989; it is not a matter of
judgment, it is a matter of luck.
The domestic law on the use of lethal force falls short of
the international standards set by the European Convention on
Human Rights. Despite the fact that the guidelines for the use
of plastic bullets have been flouted on a number of occasions,
no member of the security forces has been prosecuted for
causing a death in such circumstances. The use of plastic
bullets is also contrary to the spirit and intention of the
United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and
Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, to which the United
Kingdom Government subscribes. There has been much domestic and
international concern expressed about plastic bullets.
In May 1982 the European Parliament voted to ban the use of
plastic bullets throughout the European Community. In 1995, the
United Nations Committee Against Torture mentioned plastic
bullets as a matter of concern, and in 1998 they recommended
the abolition of the use of plastic bullet rounds as a means of
riot control.
There also has been concern in the U.S. Mr. Payne has
spoken of his bill. In 1995, the Honorable John Shattuck, who
was then the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human
Rights and Labor called for the elimination of such deadly
security measures as the use of plastic bullets for civilian
crowd control. In January 1996, the international body charged
with considering decommissioning in Northern Ireland chaired by
former Senator George Mitchell called for a review of the
situation with respect to the use of plastic bullets.
In 1996, the CAJ organized systematic independent
observation across Northern Ireland of the way that the RUC
policed the summer marching season, and they were able to
publish an authoritative report which highlighted a number of
serious concerns about the RUC's actions, including their
excessive use of plastic bullets, and the fact that again in a
single week between the 7th and 14th of July that year, more
than 8 times as many plastic bullets were used against
Nationalists as were used again Unionists.
Following the publication of the report, the government
asked the body that inspects police services in the U.K. To
make a particularly close study of the way in which the RUC
deployed plastic bullets. Their report expressed concern about
the training, the command structure, and the reporting system
for plastic bullets, and highlighted the weaker guidelines for
their deployment which pertained in Northern Ireland.
Until August 1997, the guidelines for use of plastic
bullets were not publicly available. When they were finally
made public, it became apparent that the guidelines issued to
the RUC and those issued to the army were not the same, despite
the fact that both arms of the security forces frequently fired
plastic bullets together at the same event. Although plastic
bullets have never been used in England and Wales, guidelines
for their use there were much more restrictive than those
pertaining until very recently in Northern Ireland, where 17
people have died.
On the 1st of August, following a review of the use of
plastic bullets by the Association of Chief Police Officers,
new rules were brought in that will apply across the board.
Although this tightening of the rules is welcome, it is no
substitute for the banning of plastic bullets altogether.
Moreover, it opens up the possibility that this lethal weapon
will now be deployed in England and Wales as well as Northern
Ireland, only months after the United Nations recommended the
abolition of their use.
There is another worrying aspect of the new guidelines.
They define the lower part of the body as being below the rib
cage. This does not take account of the medical evidence which
suggests that injuries to the abdomen can be equally life-
threatening.
On average, just over 1,000 plastic bullets were fired each
year between 1982 and 1995. In 1996, however, 8,165 plastic
bullets were fired in a single week during the Drumcree crisis.
In 1997, some 2,500 plastic bullets were fired during the
equivalent week. In 1998, 823 plastic bullets were fired. In
1999, according to the RUC, only one plastic bullet was fired.
Furthermore, the use of plastic bullets has decreased each year
since 1996, although that decrease must be seen in the context
of a sharp increase in the period 1996-1998 over the previous 7
years.
Obviously the decrease in the use of bullets is to be
welcomed, but there are many reasons in the current situation
which can account for that decrease. They include the growing
domestic and international concern about the use of plastic
bullets, the relative increase in the level of Unionist
protests and the decrease in Nationalist protests. This has
been particularly marked since 1998 when, for the first time,
the Orange Order was prevented from marching down the Garvaghy
Road.
The improving climate in which civil unrest has occurred,
as the cease-fires, imperfect as they are, have endured, and
with the strong public support for the Good Friday Agreement,
sustained political efforts to reach accommodation of the
contentious marchers have helped to defuse the situation. It
has also been the review of guidelines for the use of plastic
bullets by the Association of Chief Police Officers, and not
least of all, the setting up of the Patten Commission which put
the RUC under the closest scrutiny that it has ever
experienced. It is not surprising that we have seen a decrease
in the use of these plastic bullets.
The Patten Commission has expressed concern that the
government, the police authority and the RUC have collectively
failed to invest more time and money in a search for an
acceptable alternative to plastic bullets. However, they have
felt unable to recommend that they should no longer be used but
instead have recommended that a search for an alternative
should be intensified. They have recommended tougher guidelines
and more accountability for their use.
In our view, this is a disappointing stance. Plastic
bullets have never been deployed for riot control in England
and Wales despite the occurrence over the years of a number of
serious and violent riots, including race riots. English police
forces have been able to police these riots without recourse to
plastic bullets, and although police officers, demonstrators,
and members of the public have all been injured on occasion,
they have still not resulted in loss of life or anything like
the number of injuries that have been caused by plastic
bullets. It is simply not the case that the RUC would have no
other means at its disposal than hand-held batons or live
ammunition were it to abandon the use of plastic bullets.
Indeed, its claim to have fired only one plastic bullet during
the week of Drumcree this year shows that the RUC is capable of
policing some situations of serious public unrest without
resorting to plastic bullets.
In conclusion, in our opinion, once plastic bullets are
available to a police force, their use becomes inevitable; and
once they are used, experience shows that abuse also becomes
inevitable. Although physically different than live ammunition,
both in form and effect, the firing of plastic bullets from a
weapon has the same psychological effect on police officers as
the use of an actual firearm. They give the police officer
concerned such a disproportionate advantage over an unarmed
civilian, however riotous his or her behavior, that the officer
is very likely to resort to it as a means of self-protection
that can be operated at a relatively safe distance from any
opponent. This may also mean that the police officers will fail
to make use of any opportunity that may exist or arise for
diffusing violent situations by less draconian means that might
be attempted by unarmed officers.
We recognize that however well trained police officers may
be, and however tight the guidelines under which they operate,
in the heat of the moment and especially in fear of their own
safety or that of their colleagues, they are likely to
overreact. Furthermore, the use of plastic bullets, especially
if it appears to be indiscriminate, may provoke an already
riotous crowd to become even more violent.
A weapon that has caused so many fatal and serious injuries
during its history is unsuitable for use in any civilized
democracy.
Finally, I would like, if I may, to honor the memory of
Rosemary Nelson and Patrick Finucane, who have been mentioned
so many times today, and say that we would like to see the
Patten report implemented in its entirety, without cherry-
picking. But as you said this morning, Mr. Chairman, we do not
regard it as a ceiling, we regard it as a beginning, and we
hope that in implementing it, it will be possible to introduce
improvements such as abolishing the use of plastic bullets.
Thank you very much for your time and attention.
Mr. Smith. Thank you for the excellent testimony and the
good work that you do in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Winter appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Smith. Mr. Tancredo, the gentleman from Colorado, has
joined us.
Mr. Payne.
Mr. Payne. In my concluding remarks, I certainly appreciate
the three of you coming over and your testimony. As you know, I
was there in 1996 when so many of them were shot. I went to
Derry and was in Belfast and spoke to RUC people and it just--
the attitude is really something when they won't answer
questions, they won't give you their names or the badge number,
they have very short answers. They were very rude and
intimidating to the people that I traveled with.
Plastic bullets should be banned. I am reintroducing my
legislation again. We are going to urge the manufacturers in
the United States to stop manufacturing them. We are going to
urge the British Government to stop using them. There are other
alternatives to riot control other than shooting people with
real bullets or shooting people with plastic bullets. Those are
extremes, and there are many other ways to deal with crowd
control, and I think that the RUC needs to get into the 21st
century.
I appreciate the Chairman for calling this very important
hearing again. Incidentally, I met with Rosemary Nelson in 1996
when I was there--either 1995 or 1996, I am not sure--but we
had a meeting on people being detained without charges and so
many things. I was here when she testified, and so we certainly
have her memory and keep the memory of Pat Finucane alive. Also
I keep saying that the Bloody Sunday incident of 1972 needs to
be reopened and there should be a comprehensive restudy of
that, reinvestigation of that situation. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. Let me ask a couple of final
questions and one on behalf of Mr. Gilman. He is asking how
many of the 17 killed in Northern Ireland were engaged in
throwing petrol bombs,as referred to by Chairman Patten. In the
actual report, it says the unique problem which has explained
their use in Northern Ireland is the widespread use of petrol
bombs, glass bombs, and firearms in riot situations. Were the
people who got killed throwing bombs? Do we know?
Ms. Winter. The majority of them were not. As I have said,
8 of them were children, and I think some of the circumstances
are disputed, but it seems that only 2 of the 17 can certainly
be said to have been involved in rioting. To the best of my
knowledge they were throwing stones not petrol bombs. So the
fatalities are not linked to petrol bombing, as far as I know.
I wonder if I can make one brief comment in response to
what Mr. Payne said with regard to identification. That is one
recommendation, that all police officers in riot situations in
Northern Ireland must wear clear identification. I recalled
that Rosemary Nelson was assaulted on the Garvaghy Road in 1996
by police officers wearing no identification, and she spoke
publicly about that incident and she said that she had never
been so frightened in the whole of her life.
Mr. Smith. Let me ask, have any of you heard comments--as
you probably know, we have an amendment that passed that links
cooperation and training between the FBI and the RUC with
independent investigations into the murders of Pat Finucane and
Rosemary Nelson and also, generally speaking, to stepped-up
protections for defense attorneys. It is in conference now. It
is on my bill, but we are running into some flak from the
administration as well from a few Senators.
Would that amendment be helpful? Does it send a clear
message? There is a mechanism by which the President would
certify that these conditions have been met and then such a
sharing of personnel--particularly their personnel coming here,
mostly to Quantico, Virginia--would go forward.
Ms. Hall. I was actually very struck by Chairman Patten's
first point this morning about calling on all of you not to
isolate the RUC, and I said that is an interesting place to put
the burden, on the Committee as opposed to the RUC itself for
creating the very conditions which led to you all coming up
with the amendment.
From the Human Rights Watch perspective, it is the RUC that
is responsible for activities that have led to these types of
sanctions and these types of proposals. Not just by yourselves;
there have been other Western governments and other European
bodies that have also come out with very strong statements
against these activities.
So I would switch the onus back onto the RUC and say given
the egregious number of violations, given the mounting evidence
of State-sponsored collusion in these cases, you feel that it
is incumbent upon you and you simply have no recourse but to
say, as does the Leahy amendment in other circumstances, that
this government simply will not tolerate these types of
violations without some kind of effective remedy for the
families.
So, I think from our perspective we support this resolution
and we find it to be a very interesting and new way of
approaching RUC abuses.
Mr. Payne. One other area that I note in the past, and I
don't know about present, but the soldiers that would be sent
to the north of Ireland were generally young, unseasoned chaps
who probably were frightened by tales and stories. I also
thought that that was a bad practice, to put in inexperienced
persons, who are not properly trained.
Another incident is the fact that some officers, either
police or military, who have created some questionable behavior
in Great Britain, were transferred to the north of Ireland and
integrated into the force there, which is also I think makes no
sense, if you have a tense situation, to bring in people who
have a history of bad behavior.
Finally, the vehicles--I have never seen vehicles like that
anywhere but in the north of Ireland. They are enough to be
intimidating as they ride with their low running boards and the
dragging near the ground. It reminded me of vehicles that the
South Africans created called caspers; no other place you saw a
vehicle like that. This vehicle is almost coming to tell you,
``We are here, we are tough, you can't bother us or we will
roll you over''. Those are psychological intimidations to
people, and they should be stopped.
Mr. Smith. One final question and then I would make a
comment.
I continue to believe, and I think you do as well, that the
lack of vetting is probably the Achilles heel of the report and
does have to be approached and handled by a future or present
body and by the government.
What is your take on Chris Patten's statements earlier,
especially his ``witch hunt'' statement?
Ms. Hall. I suspect that many people were taken aback by
that, as I was. It is not only a poor analogy, it is very
misplaced and very melodramatic. We must remember that most of
the witches were innocent.
What we are talking about in terms of a vetting process is
something that is guarded by all of the due process rights that
are guaranteed to every person under international law. To make
sure that those safeguards are in place makes that analogy
completely inappropriate.
I think that really both Dr. Hayes and Mr. Patten need to
be continually reminded of the inappropriateness of that, and
the fact that vetting mechanisms as suggested by ourselves and
the groups at this table are in place and have been in place in
other regions of the world and other jurisdictions.
When we met with the Patten Commission yesterday in New
York, we told them that the one weak link in every single peace
agreement that Human Rights Watch has looked at is the absence
of an effective vetting mechanism. It is the one thing that has
brought down future arrangements for policing or rearrangements
in military relations in almost every jurisdiction. We see it
as a critical problem in the Israeli-Palestinian issue and with
South Africa with the 5-year amnesty for police officers.
So I think the empirical evidence of other jurisdictions
not having this mechanism, coupled with a very respectful but
firm analysis of why the analogy is inappropriate, should
really force them to drop that language from their
justification for not vetting.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Winter.
Ms. Winter. I agree very much with my colleague, and I
would also add that to describe calling to account people who
have abused the human rights of others as a witch hunt is
clearly inappropriate, and I think to make special pleading for
the RUC, I believe in any society we get the police that we
deserve, and we should keep our own police under the most
intense scrutiny because we give them extraordinary powers that
ordinary citizens are not allowed to have.
For the RUC to say we are immune from scrutiny, we can get
away with it, is to offer us a police service that we do not
deserve, and I think the Patten Commission has left them far
too much leeway in this respect.
I hope in the review process that is coming up, the
government will take the opportunity to improve upon what is in
the Patten report and rethink this vetting issue.
Ms. Beirne. First, on the screening process and the
vetting, I think it is absolutely crucial; accountability is at
the heart of getting policing right in Northern Ireland. This
is the focus of my testimony, the last half of it, of my
testimony to the International Relations Committee.
This issue of dealing with past human rights abuses is at
the heart of the issue of accountability. It ties into how do
we make fundamental change. How can you attract Catholics,
Nationalists, under represented groups, if there is a sense of
impunity for past abuses? What if Michael Finucane's family
believes that the people who colluded in the death of his
father are still in the police service? Yet at the same time,
people are being left in the new police service who we know
have been involved in very, very serious human rights abuses.
Mr. Smith. On Emergency Powers--go ahead.
Ms. Beirne. A couple of other points. Thus on plastic
bullets and the extent they have been solely used as a response
to petrol bombs--as Jane said concerning the actual incidence
of people having been killed by plastic bullets: very few of
them were involved in riotous behavior and very few were
involved in petrol bombing.
This year we were in correspondence with the Chief
Constable about the firing of plastic bullets in the Drumcree
area when there were absolutely no petrol bombs being thrown.
There was minor rioting by young children. Plastic bullets were
being fired, with young children in the immediate area, and
they were ricocheting off garden walls. So I question the
offered statistic that was mentioned, and that they have only
been used in cases where the security force is under serious
attack.
Mr. Payne's point about the Land Rovers and the general
militarism of the police force. Patten has addressed it in
part. The report refers to the total inappropriateness of RUC
buildings their accessibility and the fact that they are like
military installations. The whole force is a very militarized
force, and it operates with Emergency Powers--Emergency Powers,
around the world, lend themselves to abuse of human rights.
We feel that unless the issue of police powers is tackled,
there is a very serious risk that whatever changes are made to
policing, it is not going to change fundamentally. Patten has
obviously not convinced us and we have not convinced him, so we
have to convince government in the forthcoming consultation
process. In the criminal justice review that is taking place,
we will push (and we would hope that the Subcommittee would
push) to ensure that Emergency Powers is on the agenda and that
is addressed very directly.
As I said, Patten devoted two paragraphs to this question.
There is absolutely no attempt to justify their stance. With
plastic bullets there is at least some suggestion that they
have considered other options, but Emergency Powers, are taken
as a given. Yet if you don't tackle these abusive powers, you
are left with very little change fundamentally in policing.
Mr. Smith. I too was struck by how briefly they dealt with
emergency powers. As I said in my opening, they recommend that
the law in the North of Ireland should be the same as that in
the rest of the U.K., and then they go on to completely undo
that. Does this record keeping that they recommend amount to
anything to you? If someone is committing abuse, they are not
going to write it up.
Ms. Beirne. At the moment we are very clear from anecdotal
evidence that people in Nationalist areas are more likely to be
subject to the stop-and-search procedures, but we have no hard
data to measure that. So hard data would be an improvement.
Obviously also it is an improvement that we get rid of
Castlereagh and the holding centers which the United Nations
and other bodies have been pushing for some time.
But Patten didn't follow through the logic of his
commitment to the assertion that policing should be based on
the fundamental protection of human rights. That is what
policing is about. Yet here at the heart of this are these
Emergency Powers which all international experience says is not
going to work. You can arrest people and deny their access to
their solicitors and it is not surprising that ill treatment
occurs. We have seen in the past.
Mr. Smith. One final question that Mr. Gilman asked. Is
there a civil right to be a policeman, as Mr. Patten suggested,
so it is inappropriate to exclude members of the Orange Order
from the police force? Basically if you belong to an Orange
Order, should that preclude you from being a member of the
police?
Ms. Winter. In our submission to the Patten Commission, we
argued that membership of any organization which discriminated
against a certain section of society would be inappropriate for
a police officer who must take an oath to serve the whole of
the community without fear or favor.
The Orange Order is clearly problematic in this respect.
Therefore we felt that it would be incompatible to be a member
of the Orange Order, and I understand that the chief constable
himself has expressed reservations about that. So merely having
a register of interests is not enough and we would like to see
a situation where any police service, particularly the new
Northern Ireland Police Service, is sensitive to the
incompatibility of membership of certain groups with being an
impartial police officer.
Ms. Beirne. One thing to add there. One of the building
blocks in Patten's report is the new oath that new and existing
officers are to take--i.e. a commitment to uphold human rights
of everyone within society. Yet one must at least question
whether, given the oath that members of the Orange Order have
to take, they can simultaneously take an oath to protect
equally the traditions of the whole community. It is
interesting that there wasn't an engagement in the report with
that potential contradiction. Indeed, quite the reverse, given
that the key argument given in the report for allowing members
of the Orange Order was the fact that to deny them would be to
deny access to a very large proportion of the population. But,
in fact, that doesn't seem an overly convincing argument. As I
said there was no discussions as to whether the Patten
Commission itself saw any contradiction between these two
oaths, the oath to the orange and the oath to uphold equally
the traditions of everyone within the community.
Mr. Smith. Would it be possible for you to get us a copy of
that oath for it to be included in the record?
Ms. Beirne. Yes.
Mr. Smith. Again, I want to thank you for your excellent
testimony. We will continue to work with you and we are greatly
benefited by your insights, your counsel, your wisdom and your
courage. The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 2 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
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A P P E N D I X
September 24, 1999
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