Six years ago today, internationally acclaimed human rights activist and lawyer Rosemary Nelson was murdered outside her home in Lurgan, Northern Ireland. She died after a sophisticated bomb exploded underneath her car. Since then, Human Rights First has actively campaigned for a full, independent public inquiry to be established into allegations of security force collusion in her murder. Despite many obstructions by the government of the United Kingdom, an inquiry is finally scheduled to commence by mid-April.
Rosemary Nelson was in many ways a successor to Patrick Finucane, the Belfast human rights lawyer who was gunned down in his home in 1989 by loyalist paramilitaries, in front of his wife and children. Like Nelson, Finucane was among the small group of lawyers in Northern Ireland willing to take on politically sensitive cases and represent people who had been arrested under the emergency or anti-terrorism laws.
However, despite numerous requests over the past sixteen years, a public inquiry into Finucane’s murder has not been established. Substantial evidence suggests that members of the U.K. government colluded with assassins in order to silence Finucane, as documented in Beyond Collusion: the UK Security Forces and the Murder of Patrick Finucane, a 2002 Human Rights First report. Instead of establishing an inquiry into Finucane’s death similar to that established to address the murder of Rosemary Nelson, the U.K. government is pursuing new legislation that would seriously compromise the independence and public nature of all future inquiries into incidents of government misconduct.
Human Rights First believes that the introduction of new legislation is yet another tactic by the U.K. government to further delay the process and to restrict the public nature of an inquiry into the murder of Patrick Finucane. We urge the UK to cease this delay and move forward immediately with a full public inquiry in
this case.
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