Finucanes take justice quest to Supreme Court

Posted by Jim on June 30, 2018

The widow of murdered Belfast defence lawyer Pat Finucane has said she
is optimistic that the Supreme Court in London will finally rule in
favour of a full public inquiry into her husband’s death.

Mr Finucane was shot dead by loyalist paramilitaries at his north
Belfast home in 1989 in front of his three children and his wife,
Geraldine, who was also injured during the attack.  Several members of
the death squad are understood to have acted in concert with British
military intelligence.

Speaking as she and her children arrived at the court, Geraldine
Finucane said she wanted the court to decide that there should be an
inquiry, saying it was a promise made to her and her family, and to the
Dublin government.

Speaking outside the court with sons John and Michael, daughter
Katherine and 15-year-old grandson Piaras by her side, Mrs Finucane said
governments should be held to account.

“They can’t just change their minds when it suits them to prevent
justice,” she said. “So we are here for justice, and the inquiry.”

Peter Madden of Mr Finucane’s old law firm,
Madden and Finucane Solicitors, has said the only way that the full truth
about the murder can be firmly established and the extent to which a
policy of extra-judicial assassination was
authorised by government, is by a “full transparent public inquiry” where
witnesses and documents are subject to intense scrutiny.

“We will seek to persuade the Supreme Court at the hearing of this
appeal that David Cameron acted unlawfully in refusing a public inquiry
and that the court should quash his decision.”

The Supreme Court will examine a number of issues including whether the
failure to establish a full inquiry contravenes European human rights
legalisation.

In 2011 the then British Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned a
review of Mr Finucane’s death.

The Finucane family dismissed the findings of the review as a whitewash
and accused the British government of reneging on previous commitments
to hold a full tribunal into allegations of state collusion in Mr
Finucane’s murder.

Mrs Finucane was granted permission in July 2017 to appeal to the
Supreme Court against the decision of the Court of Appeal to hold a full
inquiry.

A panel of five Supreme Court justices, headed by the court’s president
Lady Hale, considered her appeal against that ruling during a two-day
hearing.

Opening Mrs Finucane’s case at the Supreme Court, Barry Macdonald QC
said the background to the proceedings was “complex and sinister”.

The case, he said, was “notorious for good reason”, and was one which
had attracted widespread local and international concern.

He added: “The available evidence suggests that agents of the state
responsible for law enforcement devised and operated a policy of
extra-judicial execution, the essential feature of which was that
loyalist terrorist organisations were infiltrated, resourced and
manipulated in order to murder individuals identified by state agents as
suitable for assassination – in other words, a policy of ‘murder by
proxy’ whereby the state itself engaged in terrorism through the agency
of loyalist paramilitaries.”

Mr Finucane, who enjoyed a reputation as a committed human rights lawyer
prepared to challenge perceived abuses of state power “was a victim of
this policy”.

The QC said: “All investigations into Patrick Finucane’s death have
clearly established that he was no more than a solicitor intent on doing
his job and doing it very well, albeit at the expense of attracting the
adverse attention of elements of the state.”

In written argument before the court opposing the appeal, the British
Direct Ruler in the north of Ireland insisted that the lower courts
considered the case correctly and that the decision-making process
relating to the public inquiry was a “thorough, genuine and lawful” one.