My Lords, I will speak briefly first to Amendment 63, which seems to be based on the premise that if any investigation was carried out or any report written on a Troubles-related incident, that would be enough to take it off the desk of the commissioner for investigations, and that any request for an investigation must be rejected unless the family requesting it “has compelling new evidence”. However, we know that one of the genuine concerns of many victims and survivors is that the case of their loved one was never properly investigated in the first place. In many cases at the height of the Troubles, there were understandable security reasons why proper investigations by the then RUC simply were not possible. We also know that information was very often withheld from investigating teams.
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Another source of huge frustration for families living with these painful cases is that they had, and still have, little or no contact with the investigators. They have no idea whether the investigations are active or have been shelved, and have had no updates or reports. The experience of Margaret was, I am afraid, not untypical. Her husband was abducted and held for three days by the Provisional IRA before he was shot and his body dumped on the street. She was visited by a young police officer and then heard nothing thereafter. Ten years later, her son-in-law was murdered by a loyalist gang. She was visited by the same officer, who was by then a detective. She heard nothing further about that case either. Your Lordships will also know that in the early 1970s, cases involving military personnel were not investigated by the police at all but were handled in-house by the Royal Military Police.
We cannot say that on the one hand that we want to ease the pain of victims of horrific crimes through an effective information recovery process and then, on
the other, tell them that unless they uncover evidence that the state has failed so far to find, they must be satisfied with what they have.
There is a process that is working for families and is a model for how to deal with the legacy issue, and that is Operation Kenova. I and other noble Lords will be speaking at greater length on Kenova when further amendments are debated, notably in the next group. Many victims and survivors will be very suspicious of a process that seems have as its starting point mechanisms to shut down evidence finding and information gathering, and I am afraid that this Amendment 63 is badly flawed for that reason.