Mike Ritchie, Director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, spoke at the Pat Finucane commemoration conference in Trinity College Dublin on Saturday 14th February 2009.
He spoke of the respect in which Pat Finucane’s memory is held by the human rights community. He said that organisations such as CAJ carried on his work along with other lawyers over the years by seeking to create human rights compliant regimes for police detention, within prisons and in mainstreaming rights protection throughout government and public bodies. He recalled important test cases in which Pat Finucane was involved, such as:
In re Gillen (a 1988 case which re-defined the protection available to those under threat of ill-treatment by police officers during interrogation);
Pettigrew v. NIO (a successful compensation claim by a political prisoner physically ill-treated in the immediate aftermath of the Maze escape in 1983).
Finally, he expressed CAJ’s regret that the recent report of the Consultative Group on the Past (widely known as the Eames/Bradley Report) had failed to assert the Finucane family’s right to a public inquiry and had instead suggested that the case could be dealt with satisfactorily through their proposals for a Legacy Commission To read the conclusion of his address please click here.