Sinn Féin to challenge fines

British government moves to fine Sinn Féin over continued paramilitary activity by the IRA are to be challenged in the courts, the party said today.

Sinn Féin Assembly member Bairbre de Brun confirmed the move and also condemned the Independent Monitoring Commission whose report last month prompted the fines.

The West Belfast MLA said: “The IMC was established by the British and Irish governments last year.

“It is clearly in contravention of the Good Friday Agreement. The role of the IMC was to facilitate the exclusion of Sinn Féin, to soft pedal on unionist violence and to ignore totally the behaviour of the British government, the party most in breach of the Agreement.

“The IMC is not independent, that much is obvious from its remit, its membership and the fact that it bases its decisions on reports from the PSNI, the British army and the securocrats.”

Last month the Monitoring Commission said it had evidence that the IRA and loyalist paramilitary groups remained active and were involved in a variety of illegal activities.

IMC members warned Sinn Féin that they could reveal the identities of senior members of the party in leadership roles within the IRA.

Republicans have been angered by the establishment by the British and Irish governments of the commission and were furious when on the back of the first IMC report, the Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy imposed fines on Sinn Féin and the loyalist Progressive Unionist Party.

The commission’s members are former Northern Ireland Assembly Speaker John Alderdice, ex-Metropolitan Police anti-terrorist squad chief John Grieve, retired Irish civil servant Joe Brosnan and ex-United States CIA deputy director Richard Kerr.

Ms de Brun, Sinn Féin’s European Parliament candidate in Northern Ireland, denounced the IMC’s report as a proxy report by members of the British military and intelligence establishment opposed to the peace process.

The former Stormont Health Minister said: “The recommendations are clearly discriminatory and subvert the democratic and electoral rights and mandate of Sinn Féin and our electorate.

“We already stated that we would challenge this attack on our party with every means at our disposal and at every door we go to in the upcoming election campaign.

“We have now taken a decision to challenge the British government sanction against our party through the courts.

“The British government action is a breach of the European Convention on human rights and we intend to challenge this through the courts in the coming period.”