BELFAST

Finally, a public inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane

SNadine Finch documents the long battle for justice by the family of the Northern Ireland solicitor that has led to this important step.

SEPT. 19,2024

On 11th September 2024, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Hilary Benn MP, announced that he would establish an independent inquiry into the murder of solicitor, Pat Finucane, which took place on 12th February 1989 in North Belfast.  There has been some adverse commentary from members of the Loyalist community in Northern Ireland. They continue to peddle the sectarian myth that Pat Finucane was a member of the IRA and question why his case, amongst others, has been selected for a public inquiry.

Both of these reactions underline just why it is so crucial to repeal the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 in its entirety and restore in full the elements of the Stormont House Agreement, which was reached by the Irish and British government and the majority of parties in the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2014. This would ensure that human rights-compliant laws, as opposed to quasi-legal and weaker instruments, are implemented and respected by both individuals and those who work for the state. In Northern Ireland it has been a new generation of judges ensuring that historic inquests are listed, coroners who have questioned accounts given by state representatives and the lawyers bringing judicial review and advocating for legal inquiries that have ensured that justice has re-emerged as an option.

The murder of Pat Finucane typifies the anti- nationalist and often anti-Catholic nature of the state that existed in Northern Ireland at the time of his death and that still lingers in parts of government. His career and death also illustrate the extent to which the security forces were acting outside the law on a regular basis.

Between 1969 and 1998, a number of terrorist and paramilitary groups operated in Northern Ireland but recent and overdue inquests into a number of deaths, and also inquiries by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, have confirmed long held suspicions and accusations that the British security forces were also acting outside the law. For example, a recent inquest found that members of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment murdered ten civilians on the Ballymurphy Estate in West Belfast in August 1971. It was the same battalion that was responsible only a few months later for the murders of 13 civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday.

This was only one example of incidents where credible inquests were held only after lawyers had challenged the state by judicial review, applications to the Police Ombudsman and the European Court of Human Rights.  

Shoot-to-kill incidents by British soldiers and Royal Ulster Constabulary officers continued into the 1980s and beyond until the Human Rights Act 1989 incrementally gave the families of victims and their lawyers the necessary tools to ensure that inquests did not open and close on the same day and hand down open verdicts, as was the case in the initial inquest into Pat Finucane’s death.

It was Madden and Finucane Solicitors, the firm where Pat was a partner, who took up many of the cases of detention and arrest under the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) and the Prevention of Terrorism Acts on behalf of individuals and their families. They represented a wide range of clients in criminal and civil proceedings, including individuals from the Loyalist community.

Despite this, the very fact that they were asserting that the security forces were acting unlawfully, was seen as support for the nationalist insurgency in a statelet where the security forces had been permitted to abandon many of the underlying principles of the rule of law.  In this context, a Home Office Minister, Douglas Hogg MP, was able to use parliamentary privilege to allege that there were a number of solicitors in Northern Ireland, who were unduly sympathetic to the IRA. This was on 17th January 1989, just a few weeks before Pat Finucane was gunned down by members of the Ulster Defence Association in his own home, while he ate Sunday lunch with his wife and three young children.

By this time, many legal norms were being ignored. Defendants accused of many criminal offences were tried in Diplock Courts without a jury. The Royal Ulster Constabulary often withheld or destroyed relevant evidence and military personal were sheltered from investigation and prosecution, as has been confirmed in recent inquiries by the Police Ombudsman and a number of coroners.

In addition, by the mid-1980s, the counter insurgency strategy deployed in Northern Ireland had been refined and the British Army, the RUC and the intelligence services were outsourcing many of their operations to paramilitary agents and informers. Pat Finucane was a prominent victim of this strategy, as previous limited inquiries into his death incrementally revealed.  

John Stevens, Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, re-investigated Pat Finucane’s death and found that Brian Nelson, an agent who worked for the Force Research Unit of the British Army, was involved in the decision to target him.

Meanwhile, Geraldine Finucane had brought an action under the Human Rights Act and in 2003 the European Court of Human Rights had found that there had not been an inquiry into his death that met the requirements of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 2 requires that states undertake some form of effective official investigation where individuals have been killed as a result of the use of force.

In 2004, Peter Cory, a Canadian judge who had been appointed to investigate the solicitor’s death, reported that his inquiry had been obstructed by the security services, including MI5. He went on to find that there were serious and perplexing questions concerning the extent to which the FRU had prior knowledge that Nelson had named Pat Finucane as a target for the UDA. He also concluded that MI6 failed to tell him that he was a target on three occasions and found that the security services and the RUC Special Branch prioritised the agent’s security over the protection of individuals in the community who were at risk. Justice Cory recommended that the British government establish a public inquiry into Pat Finucane’s death. This was not accepted.

Instead, Desmond de Silva QC was appointed to do a desk-top review. In 2012, he concluded that “a series of positive actions by employees of the State actively furthered and facilitated the solicitor’s murder and that, in the aftermath of the murder, there was a relentless attempt to defeat the ends of justice.”

The Finucane family had once again to resort to the courts and in 2019 the UK Supreme Court found the inquiries held to date did not comply with Article 2. In particular, it found that they had not had the power to subpoena witnesses or identify who was responsible for the state collusion found by previous inquiries and admitted in part by the Government. The Court expected the Government to then set up an Article 2-compliant process, but it did not.

Further legal action was taken in the courts in Northern Ireland which resulted in the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal deciding on 11th July 2024 that the British government had 28 days to establish a compliant process to investigate the relevant aspects of Pat Finucane’s death. The Government sought an extension to this deadline but has now committed itself to setting up an independent inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005.

In his statement to the House, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland stated that he had considered whether to refer the case to the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery established under the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023. He used the complex and legal history of inquiries into Pat Finucane’s murder as exceptional reasons for this not being appropriate.

But it is not accepted by leading human rights lawyers and community groups in Northern Ireland that there is any justification for retaining this part of the Legacy Act, when the Government has pledged to restore judicial reviews, civil actions, Police Ombudsman inquiries and inquests relating to the ‘Northern Ireland Troubles’.

It was these mechanisms that maintained accountability and legal rules when the state had departed from legal norms. Any delays in these processes were largely due to underfunding and obstruction by the security forces who destroyed or lost vital evidence.

The Commission has been given an initial annual budge of £22 million while financial resources will be much needed to restore the many inquests and legal actions brought to an end by the Legacy Act.

There are also questions to be asked about the impartiality of a Commission when its Commissioner of |Investigations was himself once Assistant Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and was a serving police officer for 32 years when many of his colleagues were part of the web of collusion.  The first report into the workings of the Commission also shows that only 10% of its employees identify as white Irish and of the mere 80 applications since May 2024, only eight have been selected for the investigation.

Nadine Finch is a former barrister who specialised in human rights law and is the author of several books on family, immigration and comparative law. She writes in a personal capacity.

Image: Belfast mural of Pat Finucane. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Belfast_mural_14.jpg Author: Zubro © 2003, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.