RIGHTS-N.IRELAND: UN Hears Complaints About RUC

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 5 1998 (IPS) - In troubled Northern Ireland, the clients of lawyer Rosemary Nelson recently were told by police officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC): “Don’t ask for Nelson – she’ll be dead soon.”

Nelson, an Irish Catholic living in the town of Lurgan, knows well that such “advice” can be a deadly warning. In January 1989, Patrick Finucane, a lawyer who had represented Irish nationalists, learned that an RUC officer called him “a thug in a suit … (who), like any other Fenian (Irish republican) bastard, would meet his end.”

Finucane was shot dead by masked gunmen at his home a month later – a murder which remains unsolved.

In imn interview with IPS in New York, Nelson told how lawyers increasingly have been caught up in the battle between pro- British ‘loyalist’ paramilitaries and Irish nationalists in the six counties of Northern Ireland integrated with Britain.

“Because I take on politically-sensitive cases, I am called a terrorist and am told I am going to die,” Nelson contends. “There is a very small number of lawyers in Northern Ireland who will handle this work now, because it is life-threatening.”

The United Nations has echoed many of the same complaints, following a visit last year by special human rights rapporteur Param Cumaraswamy to investigate the cases of Finucane and of other lawyers who have been harassed or assaulted in the North.

Cumaraswamy, in a report released last month, contended that of all the lawyers he met who represented cases involving either loyalist or republican paramilitaries, “all were able to provide testimony…concerning the harassment and intimidation” of defense lawyers.

“Many referred to the harassment and intimidation as an occupational hazard that they have come to expect and accept, noting that in the absence of audio-recording there is only hearsay evidence to prove the allegations – that is, the word of the client against that of the RUC officer,” he writes. “Therefore, most find it futile to file a complaint.”

In any case, Nelson claims, the RUC cannot be trusted to investigate the work of its own officers, since “the RUC will find itself innocent of any type of harassment.”

Nevertheless, she says, she has suffered repeated harassment, including verbal and physical abuse by the Constabulary during last summer’s “marching season”, in which Protestant loyalists belonging to the right-wing Orange Order organised parades through predominantly Catholic areas.

Now, she argues, as British and Irish leaders meet in Belfast this month to map out a possible peace agreement for the North, they must consider scrapping the RUC altogether.

“RUC is a police force, with the emphasis on ‘force’,” she says. “What we need is a thoroughly accountable police service.” Nelson has urged the United Nations to monitor and assist in training police in Northern Ireland, in the same way that the world body has helped to revamp police forces in other nations – like El Salvador and Haiti – with records of abuses.

“The experiences in places like El Salvador show that U.N. monitoring…can go a ways into rectifying these abuses,” she adds.

As British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, seek a settlement for Northern Ireland by May 7, the proposal to replace the RUC has gained wider acceptance among Irish nationalists as a meaningful ‘transitional step’ short of independence from Britain.

Gerry Adams, leader of the Sinn Fein movement linked to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), said last month that a principal demand for any transitional settlement is that “a proper policing service must be created to replace the RUC, which must be disbanded. (The new service) must have a minimum of 40 percent nationalists in its ranks.”

Currently, Sinn Fein negotiator Martin McGuinness says, the RUC is perceived as a Protestant-dominated force which is “designed to keep the nationalists in line.”

“Human rights advances must be made if this settlement is to be secure,” says Joseph Jamison, director of the Irish-American Labour Coalition, a U.S.-based trade union committee affiliated with the AFL-CIO. “Essentially, death-squad activity is going on in Northern Ireland.”

As a result, he says, the United Nations and other parties – such as the United States – should involve themselves in a process to make the policing in the North more accountable. In recent years, he notes, there has been more independent monitoring of the loyalist parades, in an effort to forestall provocative acts.

Accountability could be an uphill struggle for bodies like the United Nations, where Britain – formally, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – holds veto power in the 15- member Security Council.

As Cumaraswamy notes in his report, Finucane’s murder came less than four weeks after then-British Undersecretary of State for the Home Department, Douglas Hogg, said, “I have to state as a fact, but with regret, that there are in Northern Ireland a number of solicitors who are unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA.”

Nelson – a member of a pro-nationalist rights group, called Cearta – insists that the British government can take immediate steps to improve human rights in the six counties by ending emergency legislation, setting up an unarmed and representative police service and releasing all political prisoners.