NI: Intimidation of Lawyers
01 November 1992
The International Federation of Human Rights has submitted a five page report to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations concerning "the ongoing intimidation of lawyers in Northern Ireland by elements within the police force." The submission also covers the absence of safeguards to prevent the ill-treatment of detainees held under "emergency" legislation.
The IFHR report states that: "detainees regularly report that police officers make threats against the lives of their lawyers, question their lawyers' professionalism and suggest that their lawyers are in the pay of or are members of terrorist groupings". The report comes at a time when it is being increasingly asserted by defenders of current interrogation powers and practices that detainees must be denied access to legal representatives in the early stages of detention to prevent those representatives assisting or warning the detainee's associates in some way. The assertion is that there is collusion between elements within the legal profession and the IRA.
Police officers who threaten detainees, the report alleges, often refer to the Belfast solicitor Patrick Finucane who was murdered in February 1989. Only three weeks before this murder,
British government Minister Douglas Hogg publicly stated (and refused to retract) that in Northern Ireland "a number of solicitors" were "unduly sympathetic to the Irish Republican Army". Finucane was killed by a British Army weapon, sold to a loyalist para military group, according to evidence revealed at the inquest. His murder has also been linked to the Nelson case. Nelson was the UDA's intelligence officer until his conviction in February 1992. For ten years he acted as an agent for the British Army's Field Research Unit (see Statewatch Vol 2 nos 2 & 5).
Professor Claire Palley, Britain's representative on the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (which received the report), commented that the concerns about the intimidation of lawyers "appear to be wholly justified". She also said that suspicions of official collusion in Finucane's murder could only be put to rest by an independent inquiry. Security Minister, Michael Mates, responded by accusing Palley of making unsubstantiated allegations, and by stating that "the only people in Northern Ireland who do not respect human rights are the terrorists". Mates, however, is aware that a dossier of 268 cases of alleged ill-treatment of detainees was submitted to the UN's Commission on Torture in November 1991. These cases involve 143 instances in which RUC officers allegedly made death threats against detainees' solicitors.
IFHR and Committee on the Administration of Justice to Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities 4.8.92; Guardian 21.8.92; 29.8.92; 5.9.92.