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Review

01 September 1992

Upholding the rule of law? Northern Ireland: criminal justice under the "emergency powers" in the 1990s. Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, 1992, 68 pp. The report from a delegation visiting the north of Ireland in September 1991 is an indictment of the continuing human rights abuses committed by the RUC and the legal framework giving them carte blanche to do so. In the criminal justice system, the security situation has provided the justification for the institution of non-jury (Diplock) courts, the right to detain suspects for up to seven days, abolition of the right to silence, the right to deny access to a solicitor to suspects in custody on much broader grounds than in mainland Britain, the admission of confessions obtained by all means short of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment, the use of helicopter video evidence for identification of suspects, and the stretching of the doctrine of "common purpose" to convict, in the notorious Casement Park trials, anyone from the nationalist community who was on the scene of the killing of two armed undercover British soldiers at a funeral. On the streets and in the police stations and holding centres, these official denials of due process feed down into random arrests for questioning, gross physical and psychological abuse tacitly condoned as a legitimate means of obtaining evidence by confession, and the criminalisation of entire communities. The Haldane report is a sober and strong document which should be read.