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Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney speaking to the media outside the Royal Courts of Justice last week. Photo courtesy of Sarah Kavanagh
A REPORT on the PSNI’s use of surveillance against journalists since 2011 will be handed to the Policing Board within the next four weeks, chief constable Jon Boutcher has said.
The board - the PSNI’s oversight body - asked in September for an update on whether police had conducted surveillance of journalists or lawyers in recent years.
However, the board has waited for more than six months for a report - a situation which independent board member Les Allamby described as “frankly unsatisfactory”.
Renewed calls for the PSNI to be more transparent were made earlier this week following revelations that police secretly spied on The Detail editor Trevor Birney and journalist Barry McCaffrey.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which looks at complaints against the UK’s intelligence services, is investigating how three police forces, the PSNI, Durham Constabulary and Scotland Yard, sought to carry out secret surveillance against the journalists.
Mr Allamby told a public meeting of the board today that members urgently needed the information they had requested in September.
“When it takes a considerable period of time to do that piece of work that we think is important, that doesn’t give us the kind of reassurance we need,” he said.
“So a timely response is important.”
Mr Boutcher said the report would be released to the board within four weeks “at most”.
“We will give you the information up to the current date (2024) of any information about any applications around journalists or lawyers,” he said.
“There will be a disclosure of the information you want, that will happen.”
But he said the report would first have to be shared with the IPT.
“I will give the IPT, with great respect to the three judges, a time frame that I want to answer that question by,” he said.
He added: “I will give them an opportunity to see what we are going to say, that it doesn’t conflict with the proceedings – which I do not think it does.”
PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher. File photo by Jonathan Porter, Press Eye
Mr Boutcher told the board that since he was appointed chief constable in October “there haven’t been any” applications for surveillance operations against journalists.
“So there is no industrial application of such powers to look at journalists or lawyers or indeed NGOs (non-governmental organisations),” he said.
Human rights groups Amnesty International and the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) said the PSNI needs to be more transparent.
Patrick Corrigan, from Amnesty, said: “It’s high time that answers are finally provided to the Policing Board and we have full disclosure of the extent of secret surveillance against journalists and others.”
“The chief constable has a real opportunity to be open with the public and to distance himself from the unlawful police practices of recent years,” he said.
Daniel Holder, Director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), said: “This is a real test for the present era of policing accountability both for the PSNI and the Policing Board with its duties to hold the police to account.”
Investigatory Powers Tribunal
For the last four years, the IPT has been examining police surveillance operations against Mr McCaffrey and Mr Birney.
Three spying operations, including by the Metropolitan Police in 2011; the PSNI in 2013, and the PSNI and Durham Constabulary in 2018, have emerged during secret tribunal hearings.
The operations were only uncovered after the journalists were falsely arrested in August 2018 over their documentary, No Stone Unturned, into the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) murder of six Catholic men in Loughinisland, Co Down, in June 1994.
The first public hearing in the IPT case took place last week, although it was adjourned after it emerged the PSNI and Durham Constabulary had produced around 1,000 pages of additional intelligence material at the last minute.
Mr Boutcher told the board today that the delay was not due to the PSNI.
“There was no delay because of a failure to submit information from this organisation,” he said.
“I am satisfied that we did everything required of us.”