The Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has announced an independent review of the PSNI’s use of surveillance against journalists, lawyers, and Non-Governmental Organisations or any groups that have special status.
The independent review will be led by Angus McCullough KC, PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher announced on Monday, June 3.
Boutcher said in a statement on Monday that the terms of reference of the 'McCullough Review' will be published and that a group of "respected experts and stakeholders" will be consulted about the terms of reference.
He noted: "The group and its members are not accountable for this independent review; that sits entirely with me as Chief Constable; their role is to advise and provide direction to the work of the reviewer."
Boutcher said that it is intended that the Group of Experts and Stakeholders will consist of Baroness Nuala O’Loan; Martha Spurrier BL; Patrick Corrigan, Northern Ireland Programme Director at Amnesty International UK; Daniel Holder, Director of Committee on the Administration of Justice; Alyson Kilpatrick BL, Chief Commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission; David A Lavery CB, Chief Executive of the Law Society of Northern Ireland; and Seamus Dooley, Assistant General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists.
Boutcher added: “Angus McCullough KC is recognized as a leading Special Advocate in practice in the United Kingdom.
"It is proposed that he would engage closely with the reference group in performing his role.
“Mr. McCullough KC will provide a public-facing report of his findings when the review is finished and during this work he will be available to the Northern Ireland Policing Board to report on the progress of the review.”
The announcement of the independent review comes after Amnesty International and the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) called up Northern Ireland's Policing Board in April to launch an inquiry into alleged covert surveillance against lawyers and journalists by the PSNI.
The issue came to light during an Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) investigation into claims made by Northern Irish journalists Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney, who said they were subjected to unlawful surveillance between 2011 and 2018 in a bid to uncover their sources.
The investigative journalists were arrested in 2018 after the release of their award-winning documentary "No Stone Unturned," which investigated alleged collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and British security forces in the 1994 Loughlinisland Massacre, in which six Catholics were killed.
The documentary, for the first time, named the alleged killers.
The arrests of McCaffrey and Birney were later ruled unlawful and the PSNI and Durham Constabulary, who carried out raids against the two men, were rebuked by Northern Ireland's top judge.
McCaffrey and Birney asked the IPT to investigate the use of covert surveillance against them but only found out last year that the tribunal had been conducting a secret investigation into the matter, more than four years after they lodged the complaint.
Amnesty International and the CAJ said that the IPT has revealed three instances of covert surveillance against McCaffrey and Birney - in 2011, 2013, and 2018.
In May, The Belfast Telegraph reported that eight journalists based in Northern Ireland "were under routine surveillance by the PSNI."
However, in his statement on Monday, Boutcher said a "misinterpretation" of redacted documents made available during the IPT has given way to "public concern."
Boutcher said: “One document refers to what is described as a ‘defensive operation’ conducted by the PSNI. Media outlets and commentators have interpreted this term to mean that the routine and covert surveillance of journalists in Northern Ireland took place and in particular, the monitoring of their phones. This interpretation is wrong.
“The term ‘defensive operation’ was the description given at a meeting by a PSNI Professional Standards Anti-Corruption officer to describe a routine Professional Standards practice.
“One of the tasks of PSNI’s Professional Standards Department Anti-Corruption Unit (PSD) is to detect and deter any illicit or illegal communications by police officers and staff. Corruption in any form is a hugely serious matter. Leaking information to the media can endanger police operations and put lives at risk.
“One method of identifying and deterring illegal contact with journalists is for PSD to carry out periodic checks on phone calls made from police telephone extensions and police-issued mobile phones. The numbers called are checked against the numbers held by PSNI for journalists. There is nothing covert about this procedure. The journalists’ numbers are either ones that are publicly available or are ones that the journalists have themselves supplied to PSNI as contact numbers. If an unexplained call is discovered, PSD send an email to the user of the PSNI extension, asking for an explanation.
“To further reassure people, this practice is absolutely not about identifying whistle-blowers, for which there are very clear legal protections for those who are motivated to make public interest disclosures. However, if a police officer or staff member is involved in serious criminality, we have a duty to the public to investigate this.
“The document that refers to a ‘defensive operation’ also contains a list of eight redacted names. Members of the media have speculated, incorrectly, that those are the names of journalists being targeted through surveillance. In fact, the names relate to a completely different matter. The names are not those of journalists. For obvious reasons of privacy, and to protect police operations, those names have not been made public.
“There has also been speculation from further disclosure of IPT material that the PSNI similarly targeted lawyers through unlawful surveillance. The speculation arises from the disclosure of two pages of notes handwritten by an officer from Durham Constabulary. The notes cover a variety of topics. The officer wrote down two initials, followed by an indecipherable word that begins with the letters ‘ph’. On the following page (with several other notes in between), he wrote the words, ‘legal, proportionate and necessary’. From these pieces of information, journalists appear to have concluded that the monitoring of the telephone of a journalist’s legal representative was considered to be lawful.
“The notes themselves do not give any suggestion that surveillance of a lawyer’s phone was being considered. We have checked with the officer who wrote the notes who has confirmed that the interpretation is entirely wrong and no such activity occurred or was considered."
Read the statement from Chief Constable Jon Boutcher regarding commentary on Investigatory Powers Tribunal and announcement of the McCullough Review: https://t.co/q2tGDUVyIe pic.twitter.com/xno441xxDl
— Office of the Chief Constable (@ChiefConPSNI) June 3, 2024
Responding to Boutcher's statement on Monday, McCaffrey and Birney said in a joint statement in part: "We reiterate our call on the Policing Board to meet its full statutory responsibilities and not allow the Chief Constable to pick the referee and set the rules of the game.
"Only a full public inquiry with the power to compel witnesses will enable us to find out the full, ugly truth of what the PSNI has been doing in the dark.
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” - response to PSNI Chief Constable announcement. @BarryBelfast70 pic.twitter.com/N4r6IxuoSj
— Trevor Birney (@trevorbirney) June 3, 2024
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