The SDLP has welcomed Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain's assurance that community-based restorative justice schemes will have to be "consistent with the rule of law" and agreed with the PSNI.
However, the party's justice spokesman, Alban Maginness MLA, has warned that existing British government proposals could see such schemes actually "frustrate the rule of law" and obstruct police investigations, resulting in "paramilitary justice" and "political policing" in working-class communities in Northern Ireland.
Mr Maginness says Mr Hain's commitment "will amount to absolutely nothing" unless he radically revises the Northern Ireland Office's proposed guidelines for the operation of restorative justice schemes dealing with "low-level crime" of concern in those communities.
The North's justice minister David Hanson is due to present his final proposals next month, following an extended consultation on the original draft guidelines published last December. As reported in Friday's Irish Times, these have been rejected on a cross-party basis by the Northern Ireland Policing Board, although Mr Hain has said the final proposals will "of course" be agreed with the PSNI.
While wanting to be reassured by that, Mr Maginness confirmed the SDLP's continuing suspicion about the intention of NIO ministers, restating the party's position in trenchant terms. "The SDLP supports restorative justice," he said: "What we do not want is so-called paramilitary justice. We are profoundly concerned that the government's proposed restorative justice guidelines are so weak that that is what we might be getting. We do not want paramilitaries in the background abusing their power over communities. We insist that working-class communities have the same right to decent policing, protection against crime, and respect for human rights as anywhere else. Brutal so-called policing by local hard men is just not on anywhere."
Mr Maginness's statement continued: "Mr Hain needs to face up to the fact that these guidelines could actually be used to frustrate the rule of law and obstruct proper police investigations, in the same manner that people were obstructed from giving evidence to the police investigating the murder of Robert McCartney."
Mr Maginness said the Patten commission proposals were also about "impartial policing" whereas, he claimed, Sinn Féin's Caitríona Ruane had made clear Sinn Féin was setting up some restorative justice groups. "That is political policing and they seem happy with it as long as they control it," said Mr Maginness.
Commenting on a report in Friday's Irish Times, the Northern Ireland spokesman for the Conservatives, David Lidington, said the Policing Board's decision had reinforced concerns he had expressed all along. "Clearly the government now needs to think again," he said. "The guidelines need radical redrafting to prevent restorative justice schemes being used by paramilitaries and their associates to exert their control in republican or loyalist areas and to bypass the criminal justice system."