AN independent international inquiry should be set up into the policing of protests and parades in the North over the summer, the Committee on the Administration of Justice has said.
In a report entitled The Misrule of Law, the civil liberties group offers a detailed critique of the RUC's handling of events during the marching season. The British government's response to events is also criticised as having been "wholly inadequate".
The 100 page report, introduced in Belfast yesterday, uses many eyewitness statements and accounts provided by the teams of independent observers who represented the CAJ at various protests and parades. It focuses in particular on concerns about the use of plastic bullets - 6,000 of which were fired in one week following the Drumcree stand off.
The report comments: "We urge the withdrawal of this weapon with immediate effect. It is a lethal weapon which is inappropriate in crowd control situations, and it lends itself to serious human rights abuses."
The CAJ says it believes the damage done recently to the principle of the rule of law had been immense, and that this had long term ramifications for justice and peace in Northern Ireland.
The report says that internal police inquiries into operational decision making, policy, charges of sectarianism, and of police misbehaviour, would not carry the necessary credibility. A decision to initiate an independent international inquiry would indicate that the responsible authorities were genuinely committed to change.
The British government decision to have the Inspector of Constabulary carry out a study of the use of plastic bullets is criticised by the report. It asserts that a number of key questions about the use of this weapon are well outside the expertise of the inspector.
The CAJ also argues for radical reform of the police complaints system. It states that nothing short of a completely independent complaints system will secure the necessary credibility.
On marching, it says there is a need to find mechanisms and principles which will allow a adjudication of the conflict of rights in an impartial way. International law offers some important principles to inform the decision making process, the CAI says.
It argues that in Northern Ireland the law has consistently failed to guarantee equal protection for the rights of every person. "This failure, coupled with the abuse of human rights, has fed and fuelled the conflict here," the report comments. "A whole series of events over the summer of 1296 have exacerbated the situation.
"For example: the decision to succumb to the threat of violence from the protesters at Drumcree, who had been allowed to replenish their number throughout the stand off and bring a stolen fortified vehicle to their aid; the use of force against peaceful demonstrators on Garvaghy Road; the huge usage of plastic bullets and the difference in the numbers fired against unionist and nationalist protesters.
"The failure to intervene when loyalist protesters closed the international airport and major thoroughfares across Northern Ireland; the way in which the police engaged in the indiscriminate use of plastic bullets in Derry/Londonderry resulting in hundreds of injuries, and the death of Dermot McShane (run over by a British army Saxon vehicle), have all contributed to significant sections of Northern Ireland society questioning whether the state and its agencies are able or willing to give concrete expression to the rule of law."
The report adds: "Political leadership was required this summer and it was sadly lacking. The [British] government . . . has signally failed in its duty."