North: Bill 'will supress truth'

A human rights organisation expressed grave concern today about a British government bill allowing people who committed offences before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to avoid serving a prison sentence.

London-based British Irish Rights Watch has campaigned for inquiries into the 1989 murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane and other victims of alleged security force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries.

It claimed the Northern Ireland Offences Bill, which receives its second reading on Wednesday, would only suppress the truth further.

In an appeal to MPs to vote against the Bill, the organisation said: “This Bill, if enacted, will allow anyone who committed a crime prior to April 10 1998 to claim that his or her motive was terrorist to get out of jail free.

“While in some cases it will be possible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a crime was not motivated by terrorism, once a criminal claims to have been a member of a proscribed organisation and, for example, to have killed someone because she or he feared that the fact of his or her membership of the organisation would be exposed, it will be virtually impossible to disprove such assertions.

“Sir Hugh Orde, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, has recently established a Historic Enquiries Team to re-examine every conflict-related unsolved murder prior to April 10 1998.

“It will examine over 3,000 deaths and will cost £24.2m (€40m) over six years. On our reading of the Bill, every single person charged by the Historic Enquiries Team will never serve a day in jail.

“What concerns British Irish Rights Watch most is that agents of the state who colluded with terrorists will not be held to account because they will be able to claim that any crimes they committed were carried out in the efforts to combat terrorism.”

Victims’ organisations, the nationalist SDLP, the cross community Alliance Party and unionist parties have been highly critical of the Northern Ireland Offences Bill, accusing the British government of handing out an amnesty to anyone who committed an offence before the Good Friday Agreement.

Northern Ireland Office minister David Hanson has insisted that the Bill will ensure that people who have carried out offences have to answer for what they have done in a special judicial process.

Under the Bill, people such as paramilitaries who went on the run abroad during the Troubles to avoid arrest or members of the security forces can avoid arrest and serving a jail sentence in the North by applying to a certification commissioner who will examine if they are wanted for crimes.

If they are, the commissioner will issue them with a certificate keeping them out of jail but also initiating a legal process which will see their offences examined by a specially set-up tribunal with its own prosecutors and judges.

On-the-run paramilitaries, rogue members of the police and Army and civilians suspected of crimes before 1998 would not have to attend the hearings.

If they are found guilty, they will be issued with a licence similar to the one given to the republican and loyalist prisoners freed early from jail under the Good Friday Agreement.

If they offend again, their licences could be revoked and they would be sent to prison.

Critics of the Bill have hit out at the British government’s failure to compel those suspected of crimes to sit during the proceedings of the special tribunal.

The nationalist SDLP and Sinn Fein, which supports the legislation, have bitterly clashed over it.

SDLP leader Mark Durkan has accused Sinn Féin of negotiating legislation which allowed republicans and the British state to suppress the truth about their involvement in some of the North’s most controversial murders.

The Foyle MP has also accused them of denying justice to the victims of IRA and state violence.

Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey and other members of the party have accused the SDLP of using the victims of alleged collusion cynically for political gain.