NI: Strict rules to guide community justice schemes
Northern police chief Hugh Orde will today tell MPs that controversial neighbourhood justice schemes must work under tight guidelines if they are to be state funded.
The chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland will appear before a House of Commons committee in Belfast after claims that his officers turned away a murderer brought to a police station in west Belfast last year by a nationalist community restorative justice group.
Jim Auld of Community Restorative Justice Ireland (CRJI) told stunned members of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee that police also failed to help a rape victim seeking an exclusion order against one of her relatives.
The British government is considering plans to fund the programmes operating in loyalist and nationalist neighbourhoods, which are seen as an alternative to so-called punishment attacks and expulsions by paramilitary groups.
Critics of the schemes claim they are being used by paramilitaries to exert control over communities, with republicans trying in particular to turn them into an alternative police service.
Mr Auld yesterday denied during evidence to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee that Community Restorative Justice Ireland was seeking to be an alternative police force.
He also insisted his staff and volunteers referred serious crime to the police and saw their work as being complementary to the work of a police service.
However he also insisted that the lack of confidence in the police by the nationalist community in the North had made that task more difficult.
Orde and his officers have indicated they share the concerns of the North’s Independent Monitoring Commission about the involvement of paramilitaries in the restorative justice programmes.
The PSNI is believed to support British government proposals that the restorative justice schemes, which bring the perpetrators of low-level crimes face-to-face with their victims to understand their motivation and agree an appropriate penalty, should comply with human rights and equality legislation and United Nations standards.
The British government’s proposals also require nationalist and loyalist restorative justice groups to promote confidence in the criminal justice system including the police and to pass on promptly details of a criminal offence or offender directly to the police, who will decide what further investigations are required and if fingerprints and DNA samples must be taken before passing them on to public prosecutors to decide who should handle the case.
The committee was told yesterday by Northern Ireland Alternatives, which runs four schemes in loyalist areas of Belfast and Bangor, that they had police officers serving on their boards.
This made them different from Community Restorative Justice Ireland.
Tom Winstone of Northern Ireland Alternatives said despite this difference, his scheme was being tarred with the same brush as the nationalist schemes, with potential partners and funders holding back because of the political controversy around CRJI’s activities.
Northern Ireland Office minister David Hanson will give evidence at Westminster tomorrow on his plans for restorative justice.
