APPENDIX 4
Memorandum submitted by the Northern Ireland
Human Rights Commission
The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission
wishes to make the following brief submission to the Northern
Ireland Affairs Committee's Inquiry. If any of the points are
not clear do please come back to us.
The Commission has always supported the establishment
of the Police Ombudsman's Office, but we have not conducted any
systematic assessment of the performance of the Office since its
establishment. The comments we would like to make to the Committee
relate more generally to the need to have in place an office which
can completely independently investigate a range of matters. We
think the present powers of the Office of the Police Ombudsman
need to be enhanced in three vital respects.
First, the Office cannot currently investigate
complaints made against police officers who have retired from
the police. We know that this has meant that in several cases
the Office has not been able to conduct the kind of investigation
it wished to conduct in response to a complainant's allegations
and this has left the complainant deeply unsatisfied. We cannot
see any convincing rationale for maintaining this exclusionary
rule, since professionals should surely be judged against the
standards that were applicable to them at the time they were acting
as such, even if there is little or no sanction which the professional
body itself can invoke once the professional has resigned from
the profession.
Second, the Office is not under a duty to investigate
allegations of criminal conduct raised against police officers
by persons other than complainants who are members of the public.
If, for example, one police officer was to accuse another of corruption
there is no obligation on the Police Ombudsman to conduct an investigation
into the matter. If that Office does not do so then we have a
situation where the police will be investigating themselves; it
may even be that some officers from one police force are investigating
other officers from the same force. We do not think that such
a system provides the degree of independence in the investigatory
work that is required. Members of the public could quite easily
(however wrongfully) deduce that the investigation will not be
as thorough as it would be if an outside agency were conducting
it.
Third, we are distinctly unhappy that the remit
of the Police Ombudsman does not extend to investigating allegations
of improper conduct raised against members of the British Army
in Northern Ireland, even when at the time the soldiers in question
were operating in aid of the civil power. In this regard there
is a serious gap in the current accountability arrangements, since
the Independent Assessor of Military Complaints Procedures (currently
Mr Jim McDonald), who holds office under section 98 of the Terrorism
Act 2000, has no power to himself conduct investigations into
alleged misconduct by soldiers. The army would be investigating
itself in these instances, or the police would doing so even though
the police were directing the army in the situation in question.
In these three areas we would like to see the
remit of the Office of the Police Ombudsman extended. We hope
very much that the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee will make
recommendations to that effect when it issues its report.
5 April 2004
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