The RUC must be disbanded and replaced by a new unarmed police force which will be 45 per cent Catholic, 50 per cent female, 15 per cent gay or lesbian, and around 2 per cent from ethnic minority communities, Sinn Fein said yesterday in its submission to the Independent Commission on Policing.
The party told the commission, chaired by the former Hong Kong governor, Mr Chris Patten, no obstacles should be put in the way of former paramilitaries joining the new force. "The adoption of strategies calculated to integrate excombatants from opposing sides into new security forces and policing services has been a significant feature of many conflict resolution situations," it said.
Sinn Fein's submission was delivered by an Assembly member for West Belfast, Ms Bairbre de Brun. The commission was also addressed by the party chairman, Mr Mitchel McLaughlin.
There are 13,000 RUC officers in the North but Sinn Fein argued that the new force should be only 3,000 strong, although it accepted that this reduction could be implemented over time with some interim compromise. Former members of the RUC could have no automatic right to join the new service, although Sinn Fein did not rule out their admission.
A screening process should be set up which would identify and exclude "human rights violators", the party said. Members of the new police force should be banned from membership of the loyal orders.
The force's culture should be impartial. "None of the trappings of unionism can be carried into a new police service. This includes the name. The British ethos of all the institutions of the state must change to reflect the Irish identity of nearly half the population in keeping with the Good Friday Agreement."
Sinn Fein recommended that police structures be devolved along the lines of the North's 26 district council areas. It said that once "repressive legislation" was repealed both North and South, there should be co-operation between the Garda and the new force "at all levels and in training and operational matters".
The party called for a new body, made up of Irish and British government representatives, unionist and nationalist politicians, the European Commission, lawyers, magistrates, criminologists and human rights experts, to appoint senior officers of the force and allocate budgets.
It said a new complaints mechanism totally independent from the police should also be introduced. It called for the establishment of "restorative justice" schemes to deal with "anti-social behaviour" so that offenders could be dealt with at a local level without the involvement of "formal police and court mechanisms or physical punishment".
Sinn Fein stressed that the RUC must be disbanded. Ms de Brun said: "The RUC throughout its violent history has been seen and has seen itself as the armed guardians of the Union and for most of that time the paramilitary wing of the unionist government and party.
"The RUC has routinely violated, often on a massive scale, the rights of nationalists. It has always been and remains completely unrepresentative of the community as a whole. Nationalists have not and do not join the RUC because it is regarded as a sectarian paramilitary force established by the unionist state to maintain by force an undemocratic and corrupt system." Ms de Brun said the RUC had been responsible for at least 50 deaths yet not one officer had been convicted of murder. The Patten Commission should carefully study the Stalker-Sampson report on shoot-to-kill allegations, she said.
Nationalists widely believed the RUC colluded with loyalist paramilitaries in targeting Catholics and this belief was supported by the Stevens Inquiry, she claimed. She said hundreds of thousands of pounds had been paid out in damages to those ill-treated in RUC interrogation centres yet no officer had ever been successfully prosecuted or, as far as Sinn Fein was aware, even disciplined internally.
Ms de Brun also pointed to a UN report earlier this year which highlighted RUC "intimidation, harassment and hindrance" of defence lawyers. She urged the commission to call for the removal of all emergency legislation in the North so the new police force would be free of "the old coercive and failed strategies of the RUC".