5th July 2018

Three people spied upon by Britain’s political secret police are bringing a crucial legal case in an attempt to steer the public inquiry away from its bias towards secrecy and protecting abusive police officers.

They have launched a crowdfund appeal to raise the funds.

PUBLIC INQUIRY FAILING VICTIMS

Announced in 2014, the Undercover Policing Inquiry has yet to formally begin. Since the original Chair, Lord Pitchford, stepped down for health reasons in June 2017, it has been under the stewardship of Sir John Mitting. There were concerns about his suitability at the time, especially his background in secret courts that almost invariably find in favour of state spies, but victims gave him the benefit of the doubt.

In September 2017, a group of 13 women deceived into relationships by undercover police officers wrote to the Home Secretary with concerns that Mitting and the Inquiry were not recognising the institutional sexism of the Met’s spycops.

Nearly 200 of the most significantly affected victims of spycops have been granted core participant status at the Inquiry. In October, the majority of them wrote to Mitting expressing their grave fears about the direction in which he was taking the Inquiry.

As one of them, Kim Bryan, explained at the time:

‘As Core Participants we are rapidly losing confidence in the Inquiry and in the abilities of John Mitting. He is rowing back on commitments made by the previous Chair, Christopher Pitchford, who stated the inquiry’s priority is to discover the truth and recognised the importance of hearing from both officers and their victims along with the need for this to be done in public as far as possible.’

None of it has made any difference. Mitting has been granting full anonymity to around 30% of spycops, even when the police’s own risk assessments say there is little danger in publishing the name, and when the officer’s objection rests on fear of embarrassment.

In his first public hearing in November 2017, Mitting said he would not comply with the Met’s dodging tactic of saying they ‘neither confirm nor deny’ any details about undercover deployments. Mitting unequivocally stated:

‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny has no part at all to play in Special Demonstration Squad deployments’

But by February 2018 he was granting full anonymity to officers without explanation, repeatedly telling victims they would ‘meet a brick wall of silence,’ and saying:

‘it is not a Neither Confirm Nor Deny approach. It is stronger than that. It is a flat refusal to say anything about the deployment in the open.’

This led to victims walking out of court and boycotting all subsequent hearings on anonymity for officers.

Sharon Grant – widow of Bernie Grant, one of ten Labour MPs known to have been spied on – accompanied Stephen Lawrence’s father Neville to hand deliver a letter to the Home Secretary demanding change.

It’s plain that Mitting is to gullible and biased to be at the helm of the Inquiry. For the process to function, he needs to be replaced, or at least sit alongside, a panel of people with life experience relevant to the victims.

Phillippa Kaufmann QC, lawyer for the victims, told Mitting of the urgent need for a panel of:

‘individuals who have a proper informed experiential understanding of discrimination both on grounds of race and sex. Two issues that lie absolutely at the heart of this Inquiry… ‘The core participants – the non-state, non-police core participants – do not want this important Inquiry, something that they so richly deserve to have conducted in an efficacious way, to be presided over by someone who is both naive and old-fashioned and does not understand the world that they or the police inhabit.’

Neville Lawrence is clear that the appointment of a panel of people from different backgrounds is make-or-break. If it the Inquiry doesn’t get that, he said:

‘I will withdraw from it. I will leave it alone because it’s a waste of my time. I’ve wasted two years already.’

THE LEGAL CHALLENGE

Three core participants at the Inquiry want to bring a legal challenge to the refusal to appoint a diverse panel. They need to raise £5,000 to get a hearing to apply. If the win that, they will need a further £50,000 to bring the full case.

The three are:

1) The family of Jean Charles de Menezes; a young, innocent Brazilian man, was gunned down at Stockwell tube station on 22 July 2005 by police officers in a botched surveillance operation after he was wrongly deemed to be one of the fugitives involved in failed bombing attempts the previous day.

Over the next decade, the family endured the stress of two IPCC complaint investigations, an inquest, a civil claim, a further complaint and two legal challenges in their quest for justice for their loved one. In 2014, they were devastated to learn that their justice campaign had been spied upon by undercover police. They demand to know why and will not be denied justice again.

2) ‘Jessica’ (a pseudonym) was an inexperienced, vulnerable 19 year old girl with a love of animals. Her first real sexual relationship was, she believed, with Andy Davey,a 24 year old, socially awkward, fellow animal rights activist who shared her values.

Last year she found out that he was Andy Coles, a 32 year old, married, undercover police officer, tasked by his senior officers to spy on her and her friends. Jessica would never have consented to sex or intimacy if she had known his real identity.. She feels violated and humiliated. She wants to know the truth about his deployment and his relationship with her, particularly whether her clear vulnerability made her easy prey.

3) John Burke-Monerville’s 19 year old son, Trevor, was held at Stoke Newington police station in 1987 during which time his family believe he was beaten and in consequence suffered brain damage. A Justice for Trevor campaign was mounted, supported by the Hackney Community Defence Association. Trevor and members of his family were thereafter harassed by the police. Tragically, Trevor and his brother were murdered in separate incidents years apart. No one was prosecuted for the murders because, the family believe, of failures in the police investigation. Mr Burke-Monerville has learned that the justice campaign meetings were subject to surveillance by the Special Demonstration Squad.

The loved ones of Jean Charles de Menezes and Trevor Monerville are just two of 18 such campaigns that the Met admit spying on. Resources that should have caught killers were spent preventing justice.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

The people launching the appeal have spelled out their aim to have an Inquiry that simply fulfils its remit:

‘Our fear is that if it continues in its current trajectory that the Undercover Policing Inquiry will be a whitewash. We have been forced to initiate a legal challenge to the Home Secretary’s decision to refuse to appoint a panel with the skill and diversity required. ‘Our aim is to restore public confidence in the Undercover Policing Inquiry and its ability to get to the truth. Join us by contributing now and sharing this page on social media.’

The Crowdfund page is here.

Please share the link and, if you can afford it, donate.