Human rights and police training in transitional societies: Exporting the lessons of Northern Ireland

Human Rights Quarterly

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 943-968

  O'Rawe, Mary ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION; HUMAN RIGHTS; LAW ENFORCEMENT; POLICE FORCE;

EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; EUROPE; NORTHERN IRELAND; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE; WORLD;

EID: 27644599603     PISSN: 02750392     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hrq.2005.0039     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. Training, for the purposes of this article, is construed as concentrating on a fairly narrow technical skills base, whereas education is obviously something much more generic and challenging.
2. For discussion as to how this loyalty is a good and necessary part of policing, see, e.g., John Kleinig, Police Loyalties: A Refuge for Scoundrels? 5 Police Ethics (1996).
3. See, e.g., New Directions in Police Training (Peter Southgate ed., 1988).
4. The thinking behind such an approach is encapsulated in the words of one police trainer from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). "Somebody could be an out and out racist and still be the best police officer in the world. As long as he doesn't discriminate and keeps his opinions to himself, there's nothing to stop him being a good police officer." Observation proffered during discussion between the author and trainers delivering the Course for All, Mar. 2003. See Mary O'Rawe & Jim McManus, Human Rights in Police Training, Report Four: Course for All, Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission 39 (2004), available at www.nihrc.org/index.htm.
5. See, e.g., English Police Training Council, Community and Race Relations Training for the Police: Report of the PTC Working Party Home Office 3 (1983).
6. See also Michael Rowe & Jon Garland, Have You Been Diversified Yet? Developments in Police Community and Race Relations Training in England and Wales, 13 Policing & Society 399-411 (2003) in relation to critique of English experience of such a model.
7. See also Michael Rowe & Jon Garland, Have You Been Diversified Yet? Developments in Police Community and Race Relations Training in England and Wales, 13 Policing & Society 399-411 (2003) in relation to critique of English experience of such a model. 7
8. See, e.g., Jerome H. Skolnick, Justine Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society (1966);
9. Jerome H. Skolnick & James J. Fyfe, Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force 1993);
10. Stuart A. Scheingold, The Politics of Law and Order: Street Crime and Public Policy (1994);
11. Christopher Braiden, Policing from the Belly of the Whale, in Police Powers in Canada: The Evolution and Practice of Authority 309 (R.C. Macleod & David Scheiderman eds., 1994). Organizations live two lives; there is the structural life - and then there is the culture. The culture is formal and represents the reality of what is supposed to happen. Culture is informal and represents the reality of what actually does happen. Make no mistake - it is the culture that runs things ... the culture is at the root of the worst problems in policing. That culture is at odds with the mandate of consent policing.
12. Id. at 312-13;
13. see also Janet Chan, Changing Police Culture, 36 British J. Crim. 109-34 (1996).
14. For example, 1990s research by National Police Research Unit and Criminal Justice Commission in Queensland Australia highlighted the tendency of police recruits to place less importance on the ethical implications of their decisions once exposed to operational policing. Queensland Criminal Justice Commission, Recruitment and Education in the Queensland Police Service: A Review (1993) (on file with the author). Generally there is a relative dearth of information relating to post-training impact on the ground.
15. Even with respect to Northern Ireland, where Patten's recommendation in this regard dates back to 1999, the Oversight Commissioner who oversees the implementation of the Patten recommendations in Northern Ireland was still concluding in May 2003 that the lack of a comprehensive Training Needs Analysis (TNA) continues to remain a concern. This issue has now been raised in several [Oversight Commissioner] reports. The lack of a comprehensive TNA affects several of the Police Service's initiatives [that] ... in turn will affect the Police Service's ability to realize its objectives with respect to devolution of authority, and also those related to policing with the community. Office of the Oversight Commissioner, Overseeing the Proposed Revisions for the Policing Service of Northern Ireland, Report 7, at 102 (2003), available at www.oversightcommissioner.org/reports/ articleList.asp?page=reports&catld=13.
16. Comment made in course of author's evaluation of a later PSNI course, the "Course for All," in 2003. The original training alluded to by the trainer had taken place some two years prior to this. The course had been criticized prior to going live by members of the Human Rights and Equality Centre at the University of Ulster. Training sessions were observed, evaluated and given a poor rating by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. However, the RUC has vaunted this course as a model of good practice.
17. For example, in England and Wales, although "community race relations" training has been happening over a substantial period of time, it is only recently, and largely in response to pressure from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), that importance is being placed on evaluating the effectiveness of such training. See Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, A Strategy for Improving Performance in Race and Diversity 2004-2009: The Police Race and Diversity Learning and Development Programme (2004), available at www.homeoffice.gov.uk/docs3/strategy.pdf.
18. This is the experience of police trainers in a number of jurisdictions studied by the author since 1996.
19. In the longitudinal study carried out by Chan, et al., they echo the findings of others that the academy and field divide is fundamental in the creation of a culture that is not well disposed to human rights on many levels. Once exposed to further on the ground training, recruits tended to dismiss the first phase of academy training (which sought to raise issues of community policing and social awareness) as irrelevant and "warm and fuzzy." Dissatisfaction with the academy grew throughout the training and apprenticeship process. See Janet B.L. Chan, et al., Fair Cop: Learning the Art of Policing 142 (2003).
20. Call and Barnet, for example, argue that police reform may be most sustainable if pursued within the overall ambit of post-conflict peace building - that is, if the goals and strategies of police reform complement and forward the twinned objectives of peace building: to consolidate a lasting "positive" peace and to avoid a collapse of "negative" peace into renewed hostilities. See Charles T. Call & Michael Barnet, Looking for a Few Good Cops: Peacekeeping, Peace Building and CIVPOL, in Peacebuilding and Police Reform (Tor Tanke Holm & Espen Barth Eide eds., 2000).
21. Mani also argues in the same volume that police reform might best be pursued within the broader framework of rule of law reform, reinforcing the organic association of the police with the principles and institutions of the rule of law. Rama Mani, Contextualizing Police Reform: Security, the Rule of Law and Post-Conflict Peace Building, in Peacebuilding and Police Reform, supra.
22. For example, with regard to El Salvador, then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali articulated this phenomenon in declaring the creation of El Salvador's new police "one of the fundamental elements of the peace accords and perhaps the single component with greatest hopes." The Situation in Central America: Procedures for the Establishment of a Firm and Lasting Peace and Progress in Fashioning a Region of Peace, Freedom, Democracy, and Development, Report of the Secretary-General, 50th Sess., Agenda Item 45, at 7, U.N. Doc. A/50/517 (1995).
23. For further discussion with respect to Northern Ireland, see Mary O'Rawe, Transitional Policing Arrangements in Northern Ireland: The Can't and the Won't of the Change Dialectic, 26 Fordham Int'l Law J. 1015-73 (2003).
24. Given this, Mani, supra note 13, suggests the need to consider carefully the motives, objectives and strategies underlying police reform, to modify or "recontextualize" these in light of the particular exigencies of post-conflict societies.
25. Ralph Crawshaw makes the point well. In the event of a serious breakdown in public order... police... are faced with great personal dangers and formidable challenges to their professional expertise. For these and other reasons they almost invariably feel justified in breaching legal and ethical standards which would constrain them under other, less daunting, circumstances. When they do so they risk undermining the democratic and legal principles on which the legitimacy of the state they are defending and their own legitimacy are based. Ralph Crawshaw, Human Rights, the Rule of Law and Policing - Introductory paper delivered to Council of Europe seminar on Human Rights and the Police, Strasbourg, 1995. This point is further outlined and expanded in Ralph Crawshaw et al., Human Rights and Policing - Standards for Good Behaviour and a Strategy for Change (1998).
26. See Christine Bell, Peace Agreements and Human Rights (2000), for further detail and analysis.
27. For more detail on typography of possible approaches, see Charles T. Call, Challenges in Police Reform: Promoting Effectiveness and Accountability: An International Peace Academy Report (2002), available at www.ipacademy.org;
28. Charles T. Call, Competing Donor Approaches to Police Reform, 2 Conflict, Security and Development (2002).
29. This phenomenon has been experienced across the board in transitional societies from South Africa to Northern Ireland. The following quotations from interviews with South African NGO representatives in 1996 help give a flavor of the frustrations this brings. "Government still see police transformation as an internal process. It could be redesigned to ensure that communities are able to drive some of the changes... we need more interconnectedness. ... We need to co-create policing, not just look at policing activities." Mary O'Rawe & Linda Moore, Human Rights on Duty: Principles for Better Policing - International Lessons for Northern Ireland 159 (1997) (interview with IDASA staff, Pretoria, South Africa). "Police are an extension of their [the communities'] power rather than an extension of the state. ...The classic model cannot survive. But while we are sitting with classic policing models, community policing cannot be real."
30. Id. at 206-07 (interview with Stef Snel, UMAC, Cape Town, South Africa).
31. Call, supra note 17, at 2.
32. Id. at 3.
33. See Mary O'Rawe, Constitutional and Institutional Dimension: Transitional Policing Arrangements in Northern Ireland: The Can't and the Won't of the Change Dialectic, 26 Fordham Int'l L.J. 1015 (2003).
34. O'Rawe, Transitional Policing Arrangements In Northern Ireland, supra note 14.
35. Call, supra note 17, at 5.
36. The RUC changed its name to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in November 2001. Both acronyms will be used in the course of this article depending on the time period being discussed.
37. By the late 1990s, when the Independent Commission on Policing (the Patten Commission) published its report on future policing arrangements for Northern Ireland, 92 percent of the force was drawn solely from the Protestant tradition, the majority community (57 percent) which has historically favored Northern Ireland's status as part of the United Kingdom (UK).
38. The population of Northern Ireland stands at around 1.7 million (2001 census figures). Sutton's index of troubles-related deaths records 3,523 deaths that are directly linked to the conflict, which occurred between 14 July 1969 and 31 December 2001. The security forces were responsible for around 350 of these, many in disputed circumstances. Currently around 1,800 conflict-related murders remain unsolved. In broader terms, almost 2 percent of the population of Northern Ireland has been killed or injured as a result of political violence since 1969. The equivalent ratio of victims to population in Great Britain would have been over 100,000 killed, and in the US over 500,000, about ten times the number of Americans killed during the Vietnam War. See Malcolm Sutton An Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Northern Ireland, available at http:// cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/book/.
39. Although a new devolved parliamentary assembly has operated in fits and starts, the issue of policing has at no stage been devolved to it.
40. See, for example, successive reports by NGOs such as Amnesty International, Annual Reports (throughout the 1980s and 1990s);
41. UK Summary of Concerns Raised with the Human Rights Committee, EUR 45/ 024/2001 (Nov. 2001);
42. Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in Northern Ireland (1991);
43. Human Rights Watch, Children in Northern Ireland, Abuses by Security Forces and Paramilitaries (1992);
44. Human Rights Watch, Northern Ireland: Human Rights Abuses by all Sides (1993). See also various publications of The Committee on the Administration of Justice, available at www.caj.org.uk.
45. See, for example, the conclusions of the Stevens reports into collusion by members of the RUC with loyalist terrorist groups. The most recent report, Stevens Enquiry: Overview and Recommendations, Third Report 3-24 (2003), available at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/collusion/stevens3/ stevens3summary.htm, concluded that at least two civilian murders (one of which was that of the prominent nationalist solicitor, Pat Finucane) bore all the hallmarks of collusion and cover-up.
46. John Stalker, Stalker (1988). Neither Stalker's report on allegations of a shoot-to-kill policy operated by the RUC in the 1980s nor that of his successor, Sampson (charged with the continuation of the investigation after Stalker was the victim of a smear campaign and removed from the inquiry), has ever been made public.
47. For example, during the Fitzgerald enquiry into corruption in an Australian police force, he reported that, in the face of serious allegations, the powers that be tend to assume that stock responses will be fine. "The Justice Department and the Police Department did not intend to lose control. They seemed to think that the standard responses of secrecy and obstruction would still apply." Fitzgerald Report 1989 Report of a Commission pursuant to Orders in Council: Commission of inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct: Brisbane, Queensland Government Printer at 3;
48. See generally Stanley Cohen, The Classic Discourse of Official Denial, in Denial and Acknowledgment: The Impact of Information about Human Rights Violations (1995).
49. See Stalker (1988), supra note 29, at 34. "It did not take any of us very long to realize how unused RUC Special Branch Officers were to any sort of outside scrutiny. Simple requests for explanations of basic systems and procedures were regarded with suspicion and resentment."
50. Id.
51. In the public statement issued by Metropolitan Police Commissioner, John Stevens, after his third inquiry in twelve years relating to collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitary groups he "highlighted collusion, the wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, and the extreme of agents being involved in murder." Public Statement issued on 17 Apr. 2003.
52. See Sr. John Stevens QPMDL Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, Stevens Enquiry: Overview and Recommendations, at 1.3 (17 Apr. 2003), available at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/violence/docs/stevens3/ stevens3summary.htm.
53. See, e.g., McCann and Others v. UK, App. No. 18984/91, 21 Eur. H.R. Rep. 97 (27 Sept. 1995), Series A, No. 324;
54. Jordan v. UK, App. No. 24746/94, 37 Eur. H.R. Rep. 2 (4 May 2001);
55. App. no. 37715/97, Shanaghan v. UK [Sect. 3], (4 May 2001);
56. McShane v. UK, App. No. 43290/98, 35 Eur. H.R. Rep. 23 (28 May 2002). ECHR cases are available at www.echr.coe.int.
57. In relation to a Police Ombudsman investigation of the RUC/PSNI investigation into the Omagh bombing in which thirty-one people were killed, she found that [inter alia] significant intelligence was held by Special Branch which was not shared with the Omagh Bomb Senior Investigating Officer or the Omagh Bomb Reviewing Officer.... Special Branch and the Chief Constable were reluctant to grant access to their material to the Police Ombudsman's Investigators, and failed to inform those Investigators of a computer system where intelligence, vital to the investigation, was held.... At senior management level the response to this enquiry has been defensive and at times uncooperative. Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Statement by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland on her Investigation of Matters Relating to the Omagh Bombing on August 15 1998, at 6.22 and 7.2, available at http:// cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/police/ombudsman/po121201omagh2.pdf. Complaints about the PSNI handling of the murder of Sean Brown in 1997 prompted another investigation by the Police Ombudswoman. Soon after the complaint was lodged, police documents relating to the investigation went missing, seriously impeding her investigation. Special Branch also continued to withhold important evidence. The Ombudswoman upheld the family's complaint that no earnest efforts had been made to bring the killers to justice but did not feel that collusion had been established in this case. See Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, The Investigation by Police of the Murder of Mr. Sean Brown on 12 May 1997, Statement Under Section 62 of the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 1998 Report (2004), available at www.policeombudsman.org. Despite these factors and a range of other shortcomings identified in the PSNI investigation, the response by the Chief Constable was to issue a statement in which he referred to the lack of cooperation received from the local community in the original investigation of the murder.
58. An independent office to investigate complaints against the police, legislated for by the Police (NI) Act 1998 and established in November 2000. For more details see available at www.policeombudsman.org.
59. [Hereinafter the Patten Commission.] This Commission on future policing arrangements in Northern Ireland was set up following a negotiated multi-party agreement (the Good Friday Agreement) in 1998, which was subsequently endorsed in a referendum by 71 percent of the electorate.
60. The Report of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland: A New Beginning: Policing in Northern Ireland 4.1 (1999), available at http://www.belfast.org.uk/report/fullreport.pdf [hereinafter the Patten Report].
61. See, e.g., Police Federation of Northern Ireland, The Federation's Final Response to the Patten Report (1999), available at www.policefed-ni.org.uk/patten/section2.htm.
62. The oversight commissioner has stated that "[t]he new police college was seen as the cornerstone to providing police recruits, as well as seasoned police officers and civilian personnel, with an environment conducive to the development of all employees, and to the learning of modern policing techniques." Overseeing the Proposed Revisions of the Policing Services of Northern Ireland 62 (10 Dec. 2002), available at www.oversightcommissioner.org/reports/ articleList.asp?page=reports&catld=6. However, Patten firmly premised this notion in a wider context of community policing by the community and for the community, with human rights a central and underpinning feature of the whole process. The training college should complement rather than be allowed to defeat these aims.
63. See The Oversight Commissioner, Overseeing the Proposed Revision of the Policing Service of Northern Ireland, Policing with the Community (10 Dec. 2002), available at www.oversightcommissioner.org/reports/pdfs/ dec2002_PWTC.pdf.
64. Government and police discourse continually points to the issue of intimidation by Republican paramilitaries as the reason behind Catholics not joining the RUC in any numbers. No responsibility is taken in terms of how police organization, culture, and practice in nationalist areas may have contributed to this state of affairs.
65. See Oversight Commissioner, Overseeing the Proposed Revisions of the Policing Services in Northern Ireland, Report 5, at 100 (10 Sept. 2002), available at www.oversightcommission.org/reports/ articieList.asp?page=reports&catld=5;
66. Mark Kelly, An Evaluation of Human Rights Training for Student Police Officers in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Report for the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (Nov. 2002), available at www.nihrc.org.
67. The existing locations are both in the greater Belfast area.
68. Kelly Report, supra note 40, at 41.
69. Marie Louise McCroy, Dup Hits Out at Orde 'Enemy Within' Remarks, Irish News, 11 Jan. 2003, at 8.
70. See previous criticism of this model in O'Rawe & Moore, Human Rights on Duty, supra note 17, at 71-75.
71. It took until February 2004 for a site for the new college to be agreed. The venture is to cost around £80 million, and the facility is due to open in 2007, outside a small town some forty miles from Belfast. Meanwhile, most police training continues to take place in dedicated police premises and is largely delivered by police trainers.
72. See, e.g., Braiden, Policing from the Belly of the Whale, supra note 6, at 312-13. All organizations live two lives; there is the structural life - and then there is the culture. The structure is formal and represents the theory of what is supposed to happen. Culture is informal and represents the reality of what actually does happen. Make no mistake about it, it is the culture that runs things... [t]he culture is at the root of the worst problems in policing.
73. See the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission reports cited elsewhere in this article. See, e.g., Kelly, supra note 40. The Mediation Network has also undertaken such an evaluation of police recruit training. For further information about Mediation Network, see available at www.mediationnorthernireland.com.
74. O'Rawe & Moore, Human Rights on Duty, supra note 17, at 207 (personal interview in Toronto, Canada, 11 Oct. 1996).
75. This forms the basis of the Police Service's overall training strategy and focuses on nine core themes. These include human rights, professional standards and ethics, community policing, problem solving, health and safety, and best practice. The Policing Board endorsed the TED Primary Reference Document on 4 April 2002 following review and amendments. See Northern Ireland Policing Board, Annual Report 2002-2003, at 27, available at www.nipolicingboard.org.uk/word_docs/PDFs/ NIPB%20Annual%20Report%2003.pdf.
76. See O'Rawe, Transitional Policing Arrangements In Northern Ireland, supra note 14.
77. Various formulations of community policing exist. Essentially they are linked into an understanding that police will function more effectively with the support of the community and that partnerships need to be more coherently forged and cemented at an official level through a range of structures and initiatives.
78. This contrasted markedly with the approach of the Human Rights Working Group of An Garda Siochâna (the police service of the Republic of Ireland). In October 2000, they organized a day long exchange in Dublin with NGOs and community groups, with the aim of coming to a common understanding of what consultation is and how an effective process could be created. Regrettably, other than the production of a useful and insightful report of the agreement reached, this process has not been taken much further. The Gardaí has its own problems in terms of inculcating a culture of human rights into the heart of the organization.
79. Interview with Maggie Beirne, Research and Policy Officer, CAJ, in Belfast, Northern Ireland (May 2002).
80. Human Rights Act, 1998, ch. 42.
81. In fact, Maurice Hayes, one of the Patten Commissioners, stated at a CAJ conference in February 2000 that he did not envisage the need for the Police College to be a huge edifice as he hoped that most of the education and training would be provided externally to the college. Committee on the Administration of Justice Belfast, The Agreement and a New Beginning to Policing in Northern Ireland (1999).
82. There remain concerns as to the manner in which this was done. A new accreditation process was apparently set up for the improved training post-Patten. Two professors on the panel were not convinced that the material before them was of the requisite standard to accredit the course. On making their concerns known, they were then advised that, contrary to what was being claimed publicly, the course had previously been accredited and the panel was simply reviewing amendments. At least one member of the House of Lords requested copies of the accreditation documentation from the university (including the report of the two professors) and was refused access on the basis that this is "internal documentation." (Personal Interviews, Belfast, May 2002.) Such processes do not bode well in terms of transparency, accountability or the attainment of best practice.
83. See Kelly, supra note 40
84. The university currently provides only two days of lectures in a twenty-one week course. Kelly Report, supra note 40, at 6.
85. This same workbook has since been proffered by the PSNI to be placed on the training resource list on the website of the European Platform on Policing as an example of good practice in training police in human rights - another example of exporting the model before we can verify the accuracy thereof.
86. The author among them.
87. A new institution, which had its genesis in the Good Friday Multi-Party Agreement and was established under the Northern Ireland Act 1998, to provide independent advice to government in respect of human rights provision in Northern Ireland.
88. Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, Report on the RUC's Training on the Human Rights Act 1998 (2000).
89. At one stage, one trainer referred to the elderly as "custard dribbling old fools." Such was the concern over the NIHRC's findings in respect of this training that it was raised in the House of Commons. House of Commons Hansard Debates, 21 Nov. 2000, available at www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmhansrd/vo001121/debtext/ 0112117.htm.
90. PSNI, Primary Reference Document, Training, Education and Development Strategy, available at www.psni.police.uk.
91. Among the groups observed was the first ever intake (forty-eight students) to graduate as constables of the new PSNI in April 2002. Subsequent intakes have fluctuated between forty-eight and sixty.
92. Kelly Report, supra note 40, at 24.
93. Id. at 22.
94. Id. at 26. The report also expressed concerns as to lack of communication and sharing of information and best practice among trainers within the PSNI.
95. Although, support staff were also to receive this training, the course was essentially designed by police with a police audience and police trainers in mind. This led to the course having very little relevance to the vast majority of the support staff who sat through it, perhaps serving to further alienate them from the "new dispensation."
96. "Training alone will not change the behavior of an abusive police force or prevent abuse from arising in a new force unless it is accompanied by complementary measures that demonstrate an institutional commitment to rights-based policing." Rachel Neild, Themes and Debates in Public Security Reform - A Manual for Civil Society: Police Training 8 (1998).
97. Rowe & Garland, supra note 5, at 400.