Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): We are a moderate lot. We believe in the rule of law and believe uncertainly that no-one is above the law in this country. Since the 1980s at least, we have become fearful of the powers that governments shower on the police and alarmed often by their conduct. But we have shrunk from arguing that we live in a ‘police state’ – we don’t want to exaggerate.
But at the effective end of a long and tortuous legal process, an inquest jury has been denied the right to pass a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ on the ruthless shooting dead by police marksmen of an innocent man on his way to work. With curious blindness, this extra-judicial killing has been treated as a one-off, with plenty of coverage of the issues that have arisen directly, but little or no analysis of the longer-term context. The Sunday broadsheets were almost entirely silent.
Yet this is not the only occasion in recent times that an innocent man has been shot dead or severely wounded by armed police officers, and there have been other occasions when reckless or strange behaviour has fatally punished. And on every occasion when the police conduct has been in doubt, inquest juries have been denied the right to return a finding of ‘unlawful killing’ by coroners or by the High Court, or by both.
The case of Jean Charles de Menezes is made more alarming by the fact that he is the first victim of an official ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy adopted by the police authorities specifically designed to deal with potential suicide bombers. The police determined this policy in secret and it is not clear to me whether or not the cabinet took the final decision, or were even consulted. Certainly there was no public debate.
I think therefore that we can judiciously conclude that while we may not yet live in a police state, the police are above the law when it comes to the use of lethal force. We have been here before – in Northern Ireland. In the first volume of Democratic Audit, Francesca Klug, Keir Starmer and I soberly examined the use of force, arrest and detention in the UK. Our principal concern then was over the use of lethal force by the security services in Northern Ireland (chapter 13, The Three Pillars of Liberty) which had led to allegations that an unacknowledged ‘shoot to kill’ policy was in operation. We concluded that ‘the courts take an indulgent view’ of killings by security forces that did not conform either to the rules of the European Convention or the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force; a conclusion that the Standing Commission on Human Rights in Northern Ireland had come to in 1993, noting that, ‘There is a substantial divergence between the legal standard for the use of lethal force in the United Kingdom . . . and the prevailing international standards.’ In an earlier report, the commission also found that it was doubtful that inquests served any useful function in the investigation of controversial killings.
