Straining Justice in Britain

...He was John Stalker, deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester, an intelligent and experienced man reputed to be a thorough investigator...

...Disappointment at the ruling was keen, since many people had been persuaded that the release of the prisoners was a foregone conclusion...

...His conscientiousness was not rewarded...

...It quickly became obvious that Stalker was clean, and that his friendship with the man was totally innocent...

...The complete cooperation Stalker was authorized to receive, however, was not forthcoming...

...Stalker's inquiry was apparently further hampered by his being denied access to some relevant information because it concerned covert British security operations of an especially elaborate nature, involving not only the RUC and the British Army but MI5 too...

...The outcry by the Labor Opposition and civil libertarians over the government's handling of this case has been loud and sustained...

...Those who govern the country remain determined to resist the temptation to throw the sanctity of justice to the winds even when some people might deem such a course necessary for "security reasons...

...The Attorney General firmly denied that security forces in Northern Ireland ever had a shoot-to-kill policy...

...Despite the possibility that the boys had stumbled onto the cache by accident, the officers involved were not prosecuted...

...Within days three IRA members were slain when their car reportedly tried to run a police roadblock near Northern Ireland's border with the Irish Republic and was riddled with more than 100 bullets...

...No sooner did he begin his inquiry than he ran into hostility from both the RUC officers involved in the shooting incidents and their superiors...

...The youths were surprised while handling rifles in a countryside farm shack that had been under surveillance as a suspected IRA drop...

...He was reinstated on the Manchester police force, but another senior officer, Chief Constable Colin Sampson of the West Yorkshire police, was placed in charge of the Northern Ireland investigation...

...The court rejected an attempt to overturn the conviction of six Northern Irish Catholics who were jailed 13 years ago for planting bombs in two Birmingham bars (12 persons were killed and 160 others were injured in the explosions...

...Norman Gelb writes regularly for The New Leader on British affairs...

...Anger is particularly sharp in the Irish Republic, where there is little sympathy for the argument that sometimes the processes of civil law are inadequate to the task of waging a war against terrorists and therefore may be bent...

...Word was passed around that Stalker did not appreciate the pressures under which the police worked in Northern Ireland, where individual officers are marked out and often assassinated at home in front of their families, and where police stations are mortar bombed...

...Nor, it was said, could someone from the law-abiding British mainland understand the special measures required for law enforcement in an environment where witnesses and judges as well could not be adequately protected...

...Such cross-border cooperation is possible only in an atmosphere of mutual trust...

...Sir Patrick conceded that evidence had been uncovered indicating a conspiracy by some officers to "pervert the course of justice,' but he said the Director of Public Prosecutions in Northern Ireland (a figure corresponding to a district attorney, except with greater power to decide whether to prosecute) had determined it would not be in the public interest to bring them before a court of law...

...They also illustrate why a solution to the problems of strife-torn Northern Ireland is still remote beyond imagining...

...The feeling in Ireland and in certain quarters in England is that the judges were mainly interested in shielding the police involved in the case, who had been accused of beating the defendants in order to extract confessions...

...With Sampson's work seemingly finished, Sir Patrick Mayhew, Britain's attorney general, rose in the House of Commons on January 25 to announce that no RUC officers would be prosecuted in connection with the alleged "shoot-to-kill" incidents in 1982...

...The last is the British equivalent of the FBI, and Parliament itself has scant knowledge of its activities...

...Reports appeared suggesting he was on the verge of discovering that senior RUC officers had specifically authorized illegal actions by their men, and-perhaps more damaging-that they had engaged in a major cover-up, perjuring themselves and "obstructing police officers in their inquiries.' Once Chief Constable Sampson took over the investigation, though, the spotlight shifted away from the story-until a few weeks ago...

...The inquiry had focused on Stalker's longstanding friendship with a Manchester businessman rumored to be implicated in irregular dealings...

...In May 1986 an inquiry into his personal affairs was launched...

...Not only were they acquitted, but the judge in the case commended the officers for bringing terrorists to the "final court of justice...

...He was relieved of his assignment and given an extended leave-a euphemism for suspension...

...Like the men in the first incident, these two were said by police to have attempted to crash a roadblock and were found to be unarmed...

...Official assurances that the decision not to prosecute was based solely on national security considerations-and was not merely a way of concealing an unacceptable policy for dealing with terrorism-have been met with outright skepticism...

...The series of events aroused deep concern in Northern Ireland's minority Catholic community, even among those who had no stomach for the anti-British campaign of violence...

...In the autumn of 1982, following an upsurge of murders and bomb attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), security forces in Northern Irelandpolice, military and special units-were beefed up and put on intensive alert...

...Two weeks after the roadblock incident, an undercover RUC squad gunned down two teenage boys, one fatally...

...The dispute comes at an unfortunate moment, for the RUC and the Irish police have increasingly been acting in concert of late to staunch cross-border terrorism -an effort that has taken on added importance in the light of recent proof that the IRA has been acquiring tons of sophisticated weaponry from Libya...

...Rumors circulated that the beleaguered officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary had been given instructions of the shoot-to-killask-questions-later variety...

...A short time later another RUC undercover unit, acting on an informer's tip, shot and killed two members of the Irish National Liberation Army, a splinter group that considers the IRA too moderate...

...Doing so might endanger lives, explained Sir Patrick-no doubt having in mind vulnerable individuals like IRA informants, deep cover MI5 agents who have infiltrated paramilitary organizations, and elite undercover anti-terror operatives from Security Advisory Services...

...The removal of Stalker inevitably aroused suspicions...

...And it is this tradition that makes an official decision last month regarding actions taken by police officers in Northern Ireland more than five years ago particularly embarrassing...

...It was a profound commitment to the rule of law over brute force that recently prompted a British government minister to violate diplomatic proprieties while on a trip to Israel and publicly condemn the rough treatment administered to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by Israeli soldiers...

...A determined sleuth, Stalker nevertheless pressed forward with his investigation...

...The judge and his wife were later killed by an IRA bomb...

...But the Irish displeasure with Britain following Sir Patrick's announcement has been intensified by a decision of the Court of Appeals here later the same week...

...Despite a vigorous campaign to prove that the six were innocent, three distinguished High Court judges, including Lord Lane, the Chief Justice of England, dismissed the new evidence brought by the defense as utterly unconvincing...

...These developments have demonstrated again that the burden of uncomfortably shared history weighs too heavily on British-Irish relations for there to be any easy coexistence or deep trust between the two nations in the foreseeable future...

...Amid charges that security forces had become trigger-happy, three officers of the Northern Irish police force, known as Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), were tried for the roadblock killings...

...The three men turned out to have been unarmed at the time...

...At the same time, he told the Commons that disciplinary action would be taken against police officers shown to have participated in attempts to obstruct justice...

...As is customary in Britain when grave allegations about police conduct are raised, a senior officer of another police force was assigned to look into the matter...