The Government's 11-page assessment of the British Irish Rights Watch report on the murder of Mr Pat Finucane was sent to the Northern Ireland Secretary, Dr Mo Mowlam, by the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell, with a covering letter, dated April 13th, as follows:Dear Mo,
I am writing to you about the report by British Irish Rights Watch into the murder of Pat Finucane which we both received on 12 February last.
I read the report and also asked our officials to examine it. The attached assessment sets out their views. In the light of the report and this assessment, I believe that the case for a public inquiry into all the circumstances surrounding Mr Finucane's murder is compelling.
As the assessment argues, the Finucane case and the associated allegations of collusion, fulfil the fundamental requirement of a public inquiry - i.e. that the matter under consideration is of urgent public interest. The accumulated evidence is sufficient to give reasonable cause to the public to believe that collusion may have taken place. Moreover, the allegations in question serve to undermine confidence in the rule of law and the concept of equality before the law. In my view, they can only be answered with confidence - one way or the other - through the mechanism of a public inquiry.
While it is invidious to select one victim as more deserving than another, I believe that the murder of a lawyer is different in symbolic terms, though not obviously in human terms for the relatives left behind. To blur the lines between client and lawyer by targeting the lawyer is a fundamental attack on the rule of law and thus the very basis of civilised society. This makes the case for a public inquiry all the more compelling. As you can see from the assessment, we very much approached the Pat Finucane case as a reckoning with the past so as to signal that the new dispensation of the Good Friday Agreement represents a new reality and the promise of a new future. The assessment was written before the heinous murder of Rosemary Nelson. Her murder has shocked all of us, North and South, including of course the legal/human rights community both here and abroad.
In the spirit of the close co-operation and collegiality that marks relations between our two governments, we will not be taking a further public position on the case until we have had an opportunity to discuss it together. I hope this will be possible over the next few days.
Yours sincerely,
Liz O'Donnell, T.D.,
Minister of State
This is an edited version of the Government's assessment sent to Dr Mowlam:
An assessment of the report by British Irish Rights Watch
General
British Irish Rights Watch (BIRW) states that its report into the murder of Pat Finucane, based on painstaking research over a number of years by a range of bodies and individuals, seeks to set out in good faith what it believes to be the facts of "an extremely sinister situation".
Source Material
The report is based on two sources of information, one public and one confidential. The first is a compilation of the results of investigative journalism and other information publicly available - trial transcripts and parliamentary debates, for example. The second is a body of material compiled by [name blanked out of document] a widely respected journalist [..... words blanked out] from confidential contacts and sources. This material purports to be copies of documents originating within the British security and intelligence establishment and a copy of a diary kept by a key agent, Brian Nelson. Should this second body of information be authenticated, then it qualitatively enhances the validity of the allegations made in the report regarding certain security force activities in the 1988 - 1994 period.
Primary Allegations
The report makes four primary and over-riding allegations:
- that the security forces were complicit in the murder of Pat Finucane.
- that elements within the RUC incited his murder in a number of ways, that named officers in the RUC procured his murder and that RUC Special Branch had detailed advanced knowledge of the murder plot.
- that his murder was part of a "systematic strategy" directed by a unit (Force Research Unit - FRU) within British military intelligence whose purpose was to direct loyalists to murder republicans in what the report describes as "state murder by proxy". If true, BIRW believes that it means that FRU committed serious crimes, "including conspiracy to murder, by collecting and providing information likely to be of use to terrorists and directing terrorism".
- that FRU's agent, Brian Nelson, enhanced loyalist intelligence and this, combined with his assistance in procuring a major shipment of South African arms for loyalists (in which M15 agents were alleged to be instrumental and about which British military intelligence was aware in advance), allowed loyalists to double their capacity for lethal force long after Nelson's activities as an agent ended.
BIRW Profile Of FRU
According to the report, the FRU had detachments in seven barracks across Northern Ireland. Its HQ was based in Lisburn. It was commanded by a lieutenant colonel and employed somewhere in the region of 80-90 army personnel, the core of whom handled agents in the field. Many of these agents were informants in paramilitary organisations, both loyalist and republican.
Is The BIRW Report Compelling?
While the impetus for BIRW's report stemmed from the existence of the material which came into the journalist's possession, the strength of the case presented by BIRW derives from this combination of information in the public domain with that provided by the journalist. This combination creates a cogent case for a belief, on a prima facie basis, that elements in the security forces may have committed a range of serious crimes and breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights. Very disparate sources of evidence including sequences of apparently official and confidential reports, fragments of and omissions from those records, trial transcripts, the results of investigative journalism and investigations by various human rights organisations, have been brought together in a way which suggest corroboration and mutual reinforcement for the allegations.
The report also points to patterns which tend to confirm widespread suspicions that elements in the security forces were used, at the expense of the rule of law, to prosecute a campaign against those deemed enemies of the state and to conceal what that entailed and who was culpable. These patterns include the stark change in the volume and precision of loyalist lethal force between 1988 and 1994, the failure to apprehend those involved, the failure to convict members of the UDA/UFF for murder, the failure to thoroughly investigate the allegations of collusion, the failure to publish the reports of these police inquiries or pursue prosecutions and the failure to respond to compelling and growing evidence by establishing a full judicial inquiry.
Basis For A Public Inquiry?
A public inquiry is held when it is deemed that there are matters sufficient on the grounds of urgent public interest to warrant one.
A crucial question is whether the matter of public interest can reasonably be seen to justify an inquiry on the basis of merit alone. Generally inquiries are about matters in which the state or its agents (whether individuals or bodies) are believed to have been involved either through acts of omission or commission. The value of an inquiry in terms of the society as a whole is that it seeks to locate where culpability lies and thus establish a basis on which society, through its democratic system, can set abut rectifying identified faults. Such faults can arise either through negligence (e.g. Dunblane) or because of systematic problems (such as institutional racism in the London Metropolitan Police in the Lawrence case).
In this context, there can be little doubt but that the Finucane case sufficiently meets the criteria for a judicial inquiry. The following points are germane:
- On a prima facie basis, the material contained in the BIRW report would seem to point to serious breaches of domestic and international law by individuals acting or claiming to act on the part of the state.
- the failure to hold a public inquiry into the issue of collusion.
- the failure to publish the reports of the two investigations undertaken by John Stevens.
- the compelling circumstantial evidence presented by the marked change in the pattern of loyalist killings between 1988 and 1994 involving both a substantial increase in frequency and precision.
- the circumstantial evidence in numerous cases of security force activity immediately prior to the arrival of loyalist gunmen intent on launching lethal attacks and the consistent failure to apprehend, at any point over a six-year period, any of the limited number of loyalist gunmen involved, despite the existence of a network of agents and informers, including crucially Brian Nelson as chief intelligence officer for the group primarily responsible, the UDA/UFF.
- the renewed admissions by loyalist paramilitaries that information from security sources was given to them on a regular and widespread basis, and that this information significantly enhanced their ability for targeting and lethal force.
- the allegation that agents of the state were involved in illegal arms shipments from South Africa to loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland.
- the failure of the authorities to satisfactorily account for the purpose and activities of the FRU.
- the failure to prosecute a single RUC officer on grounds of collusion.
- the failure of the DPP to use Brian Nelson as a witness despite his admission of direct knowledge about a number of murders and their perpetrators.
- the belief that RUC officers failed to co-operate with and possibly sought to frustrate the Stevens investigation, noting the account provided by John Stalker of his attempts to investigate allegations of shoot-to-kill detailing hostility and obstruction by members of the RUC.
- the belief that FRU sought to frustrate and misdirect the Stevens investigation.
- the widespread belief in the nationalist community that members and units of the security forces were involved in systematic purposeful collusion.
- the allegation that FRU and RUC Special Branch had advance knowledge of impending attacks by loyalists and took no action.
- that unless and until the widespread concerns in the nationalist community that collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries was widespread, purposeful and directed are examined by a public inquiry, confidence in the administration of justice and the security forces will be undermined.
Consequences Of Sustained Peace
In the Northern Ireland context, it is perhaps inevitable that after decades of both paramilitary violence and counter-insurgency measures, calls for inquiries into a variety of controversial circumstances involving the use of lethal force by the state would gain momentum in the context of a sustained peace. It has been a poignant characteristic of relatives who have lost loved ones in such circumstances that the desire for truth and justice reaches a particularly acute point during sustained peace where previously the perpetuation of violence and atrocity occluded from public view their own pain and loss.
The lack of corrective action denied them the normal solace of the pursuit and prosecution of those who inflicted such pain and loss. Those failures endorsed an existing sense among nationalists of being under-valued and unequal in the eyes of the law. However desirable in terms of political reconciliation it may be to draw a line under the past, victims' relatives will inevitably carry their burdens into everyone's present and to continue to do so unless and until they have answers that help reconcile them with their loss. This applies equally to all those culpable of violence in whatever cause. The pursuit of certain cases can serve to be representative of that process of candour and truth. The Finucane murder would manifestly be such a case.
12 April 1999
The full text of the Government's assessment of the British Irish Rights Watch report is available on The Irish Times on the Web at http://www.ireland.com
