Kate Wilson outside the Royal Courts of Justice, 3 October 2018

Wednesday 3 October was one of the most extraordinary days in the eight gruelling years of convoluted legal cases by spycops victims.

Kate Wilson, deceived into a long-term relationship by undercover police officer Mark Kennedy, finally secured proof that managers sanctioned it, and saw the court order police to substantively respond to her claim at long last.

As a group accustomed to police stonewalling ahead of a day in court, biased judges in the courtroom, and empty hands as we leave the building, it was a startling relief.

The public inquiry, which is supposed to be independent investigation into acknowledged police wrongdoing, has lost the faith of victims because it protects officers who committed perjury, sexually abused women and undermined democratic organisations.

And yet last week’s hearing at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – special secret courts the adjudicate on matters of state surveillance – gave the Met short shrift and ordered them to produce witness statements responding to the facts of the case so that the Tribunal can establish what happened and who knew.

The myth of rogue police officers

The Met’s extensive self-investigation into spycops, Operation Herne, was unequivocal. In 2014 they issued a report telling us:

‘There are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate for such covertly deployed officers to engage in intimate sexual relationships with those they are employed to infiltrate and target.

‘Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.’

We now know this is not true.

Kate Wilson was given a 200 page sample of the 10,000 pages of documents containing her name that the Met admit to holding. They show Mark Kennedy’s managers were well aware of the extent of his relationship with her, right down to details of him cleaning her mum’s windows. They authorised payments – from the public purse – for him to buy her gifts.

It’s the latest U-turn in a long trail of police dodging disclosure and accountability. Wilson was one of eight women who brought a legal claim in 2011.

The Met initially suggested the women should instead sue the individual spycops in the relationships. They were rogue officers, the women were told.

‘It is absolutely not authorised… It is never acceptable under any circumstances… for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with’
– Chief Constable Jon Murphy, spokesperson for the Association of Chief Police Officers which ran Mark Kennedy’s National Public Order Intelligence Unit.

But the patterns of the relationships with so many women over several decades were so similar it was patently clear that this was strategy and training. There is nothing Mark Kennedy did as a police officer that wasn’t done by dozens before him. Far from being rogue, he was textbook.

Unauthorised authorisations

The women noted the police’s contention that relationships weren’t authorised, and that it meant the case would be heard in open court, rather than the secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) that deals with authorised state surveillance.

The police baulked at this and, less than a year after telling the court the relationships were unauthorised, the same Met lawyers were back in the same courtroom saying of course the relationships were authorised, and therefore the case should go to the secretive IPT where complainants are barred from court and don’t see the evidence against them.

The police lawyers pointed out that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 authorises ‘personal and other relationships’.

The word ‘other’ might imply non-personal, such as business relationships, but the dictionary definition encompasses literally all kinds of relationship. Because of this, the Met said that any relationship – even years spent as a co-habiting lifepartner integrated into a family – can be regarded as included and would therefore be authorised and legal.

This argument is why Kate Wilson has ended up at the IPT and not in a normal court.

What is the Investigatory Powers Tribunal?

The IPT was set up under the Regulatory of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). The government realised that state surveillance could breach human rights, but didn’t want complaints dealt with in open court for reasons of security.

The IPT is a bizarre institution. Most of its hearings are held in secret. At these, the citizen complaining isn’t allowed to attend. Neither are their lawyers. They just get to effectively shove their papers under the door.

The state spies, however, are in court. The complainant doesn’t get to see what’s in the MI5/police papers, so they can make anything up about the complainant, or omit anything that is unhelpful to the security services’ case. The judges look at both sets of papers, talk to the spies, then make a judgment.

They only announce who has won. They do not explain their reasoning, nor even confirm that any spying ever took place. The complainant cannot appeal against the judgment.

We don’t know how many cases they hear, but looking at the annual reports of the
Interception of Communications Commissioner, between 2000 and 2011 there were at least 1,300. Of these, just 10 complaints – less than 1% – were upheld.

They have held Kate Wilson’s preliminary hearings in public, which bodes well for access to hearings in the rest of her case.

Police obstructing justice

The police, true to form, have tried to get out of disclosing documents with any argument that comes to hand. At the last hearing, they said that there’s no need to give Kate the 10,000 documents they have on her as they have already admitted that her human rights were breached.

They’ve previously used compensation to fob off similarly deceived women who would have preferred ‘less money and more truth‘. By the same token, this case is not about stopping at abstract admissions. It is about knowing the facts of what happened, how extensive the surveillance was, why it was authorised, who knew, and then holding those responsible accountable for their actions.

It’s a safe bet the other women abused by spycops were monitored and documented to the same degree. They too deserve real answers – all the women affected should be given their full, unredacted files so they can judge for themselves what went on rather than trusting the police who abused them to make redactions.

If had been found to be, say, a secret medical unit that had been abusing citizens for decades, it’s unthinkable that the doctors involved would be protected from scrutiny and prosecution. The exceptionalism expected by police – and too often granted to them – is utterly extraordinary.

An organisation interested in justice would want those who abuse power rooted out. Instead, the police commit a second injustice against the victims as they close ranks around miscreants, doing all they can to stymie efforts to get to the truth.

Kate Wilson’s case against the police

Wilson’s civil case with seven other women ended in 2015 with an unprecedented apology from the Met which plainly asserted:

‘sexual relationships between undercover police officers and members of the public should not happen. The forming of a sexual relationship by an undercover officer would never be authorised in advance nor indeed used as a tactic of a deployment.’

The new release of 200 pages from her files demolishes that. As Wilson wrote in The Guardian:

‘I was lied to by the police in a public apology that was supposed to be reparation for their deceit and abuse.

‘Now I really want answers. I want to know how high up the police hierarchy knowledge of the abuses went. I want access to the 10,000 documents they claim to hold on me, and to know why at least eight police officers were sent to deceive me and spy on every area of my life.

‘I want the court to examine the institutional sexism and political prejudices that informed the decisions they made, and to look at the legality of the operations and the inadequate laws that are supposed to protect our human rights.’

Wilson’s IPT case asserts that the police breached a number of her rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

The police have already conceded that they violated Articles 3 and 8.

Article 3 – the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment – is a fundamental right; there are no circumstances in which it is acceptable to breach it. Since 2002, the constable’s oath taken by every new officer includes swearing to ‘uphold fundamental human rights’.

Article 8 – the right to a private and family life – is qualified. It may be breached for some reasons, for example for national security. The police have said this threshold was not reached in Wilson’s case. They admit that her activities were not a threat to the public and did not warrant such intrusion, which undermines the ‘eco terrorist domestic extremists’ line the police have been pushing to the Undercover Policing inquiry and elsewhere.

Taken together, these are already huge admissions with major implications for the efforts of other spycops’ victims seeking the truth about what was done to them.

She also claims they violated Article 10 (freedom of expression), Article 11 (freedom of association), and Article 14 (freedom from discrimination). The police still haven’t answered these.

What next for Kate Wilson’s case?

At a hearing a year ago the police were told to disclose their documents. They have failed to do this (again, this has been a standard delaying tactic over the last eight years).

The police told the court it would be expensive and Met funds are finite; these words came from the mouth of the fifth new lawyer for the police in the past six years, as the police have dragged out Wilson’s claim since 2011, seemingly having no problem finding funds for devious vexatious attempts to strike out the case and avoid accountability.

‘It’s expensive to comply with the law so we won’t’ isn’t a convincing argument from anyone, least of all those who are supposed to enforce it. The fact that it’s a big job makes it more important, not less. They systematically abused citizens for decades. The public deserve answers.

The Met told the court that they still regard Kennedy’s actions – which they admit breach the Human Rights Act – as properly granted and fully lawful.

They also argued that the Undercover Policing Inquiry could do the job of investigation. Even if we ignore the fact that it has turned into a secret public inquiry, gullibly believing the proven liars who are its subject whilst treating victims with suspicion and disdain, it is optimistically predicting that the public will see its report in 2024, six years away and 14 since Wilson discovered the truth about Kennedy.

The court was having none of it. It gave the police three months to provide witness statements with supporting evidence and a fully pleaded defence of their case. Then it went further, requesting that all relevant authorisations and the intelligence that led to those authorisation requests in the first place be explained and provided to the Tribunal, in order to assess whether the operations were lawful at all.

What the court does after that is uncertain. We have no guarantee that we will see any of the material. But if we were finally on the road to truth and justice, this is what it would look like.

‘I was abused by an undercover police officer who was sent into my life, into my home, into my parents’ home, and into my bed, by the Metropolitan Police.’
– Kate Wilson

Kate Wilson, lifelong social and environmental activist, was deceived into a long-term, intimate relationship by an undercover police officer, Mark Kennedy.

She won a Civil Claim against the police and is now taking legal action under human rights legislation.

There will be an important hearing in the case on Wednesday 3rd October, with a support demonstration outside beforehand.

The relationship

‘I met Mark in 2003 at an open political meeting in Nottingham about mobilising against the G8. He was charming, and we seemed to share a lot of interests. Within about two weeks of that meeting we had started a romantic relationship.

‘He moved into a house with me and some friends, and we lived together for over a year. He visited my parents on many occasions, and he attended my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday. He was my partner in just about everything, for two years, and then we separated, but we remained close friends with him often visiting me right up until 2010.’

Kate Wilson and Mark Kennedy

In 2010, a friend rang Kate to tell her that Mark had been outed as an undercover officer. The effect this has had on her life has been shattering.

‘The impact on your life and relationships is devastating. The psychological damage is deep and long lasting, because of the intrusiveness and the psychological violence of the tactics they use.

‘It is not just the sexual relationships, but the intimacy, the emotional manipulation and the abuse of trust, which is completely inherent to any undercover policing operation. I think the impact of that could be seriously underestimated by anyone who has not been subjected to it.’

Since 2010, Kate has discovered the infiltration was even greater than first suspected . For a period of twelve years, colleagues, house-mates, lovers and casual acquaintances have all turned out to have been undercover police, and all because of her dedication to making environmental and social change.

These officers include confirmed undercover officers Jim Boyling (‘Jim Sutton’), ‘Jason Bishop‘, ‘Marco Jacobs‘, ‘Lynn Watson‘, ‘Rod Richardson‘, and Mark Kennedy (‘Mark Stone’) as well as two men who visited, claiming to be ‘friends of Mark Stone’, introducing themselves as ‘Vinny’ and ‘Ed’. Of course, there may be others whose identity is not yet known.

Background on Kate’s legal battle

In 2015, the police withdrew their their defence against Kate’s civil claims of deceit, assault/battery, misfeasance in public office and negligence, and in 2017 she became one of a growing number of women to receive an apology from the Metropolitan Police for relationships they had with undercover police.

Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt, the Metropolitan Police finally conceded that:

‘officers, acting undercover whilst seeking to infiltrate protest groups, entered into long-term intimate sexual relationships with women which were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong” and that “these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma.’

However, the police continue to lie, obfuscate and obstruct any attempt to gain access to reliable information about the extent of this abuse and the political motivations behind it, or of how far up the chain of command knowledge of these tactics went. Kate and other women are therefore still fighting for the truth, and Kate’s claim has gone into the Human Rights Courts.

Human Rights Claim

Kate’s human rights claim is being heard by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a judicial body, which hears complaints about surveillance by public bodies.

She accuses the police of Human Rights violations that include inhumane and degrading treatment at the hands of Mark Kennedy and his supervisors; but which also include being a victim of sexist discrimination by police, and violations of her right to private life, and her political rights to freedom of association and expression, not only by Mark Kennedy, in his time as her partner, but also by at least seven other undercover officers, and by managers and commanding officers right up the chain, over a period of more than 12 years.

She is claiming that the police violated her Human Rights under Articles 3, 8, 10, 11 and 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Ultimately, Kate is seeking the truth about what happened:

‘I want to see the files, I want them to fill in the gaps about all of those moments where I don’t know what was really happening in my life. I naively believed that the courts could force the police to give us information about that, because the truth is the most important reparation. Instead, what’s happened is that we’ve had the full might of the police legal department and huge amounts of public funds being dedicated to making sure we never get any any information at all.’

Kate’s claim deals with human rights violations that raise serious questions about the role of senior officers in sexual abuse.

‘I had a relationship with a man who didn’t exist, but that was supported by a back room team, managers, and superior officers who were making the decisions about that relationship. There were support teams following him around on our holidays, and people listening to our phone calls, and reading our emails. Perhaps they were taking photographs of us together, or even listening to us when I believed we were alone.

‘They knew every detail of my life. I still don’t even know who they were; and it is not just me. These units have been systematically abusing women in this way since 1968.’

And that amounts to institutional sexism, a fact the police are desperate to cover up.

Kate’s claim questions the legitimacy of such political policing in a democratic society, and the legality of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) that is used to authorise such operations.

The case is still in its preliminary stages. The police initially tried to get the case held in secret, but have since been forced to make significant public admissions in their written defence. They were ordered by the court to release secret documents, but in the most part have simply failed to do so.

They are now trying to get the case closed down, saying that if they admit to certain parts of the claim they should not need to release any more evidence. On 3rd October the Tribunal will hear arguments about whether it should give in to this request to limit the hearings.

This means the Tribunal would not examine the extent of senior officers’ involvement in the abuse; it would not assess the lawfulness of the involvement of at least seven other undercover police officers in Kate’s life; and it would ignore the issue of whether such intrusion violated the principle that human rights should be enjoyed by all, without discrimination on grounds of sex or political beliefs.

These are all extremely important issues, not only for Kate, but for society as a whole. The case comes at significant personal cost, and this gets worse the longer the Police try to obstruct it.

‘The police being unbelievably bullying in their response to our cases, and we have had to reveal huge amounts of deeply personal information to the courts and to the police and to the police solicitors. The whole process has been very damaging, constantly pouring salt in the wounds that were created when I found out that Mark in fact didn’t exist.’

Show your support for Kate by attending the hearing and/or the demonstration outside the hearing on Wednesday 3 October at 9.30am, and spread the word with the Facebook event.

This article was originally published by Police Spies Out of Lives.

Marc Wadsworth, spycops People’s Inquiry, 8 July 2018

On 8 July 2018, people targeted by Britain’s political secret police held a ‘people’s inquiry’ at Conway Hall in London.

Exasperated by the state public inquiry’s bias towards secrecy as it drags on for years without even formally starting, the victims of spycops held this theatrical event to envision what an effective inquiry would look like.

It was part of a weekend of activities celebrating 50 years of progressive political campaigns achievements despite being infiltrated by counter-democratic police.

Our Youtube Channel has three short videos from the People’s Inquiry session.

This first one has an overview of the People’s Inquiry event, showing the kind of first-hand testimony that was heard from a diversity of people whose lives were invaded in a wide variety of ways, and it also shows thirst for justice in those present.

One of the people giving testimony was veteran anti-racist campaigner Marc Wadsworth. In the 1980s he led the Labour Party’s black section, and in the 1990s he was leader of the Anti-Racist Alliance.

Asked by Stephen Lawrence’s family to help build their campaign for justice, Marc was targeted by officers from Britain’s political secret police. He is a core participant at the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

At the end of the afternoon the panel gave a list of recommendations for an effective inquiry, a list of demands to remedy what is absent from the increasingly pointless, expensive and secret state inquiry

Our 13 Recommendations following the Peoples Public Inquiry:

1. Full disclosure of all names – both cover and real – of officers from the disgraced political police units, accompanied by contemporaneous photographs

2. Release of the names of all groups suspected to have been spied upon

3. Release of all personal files on activists

4. Extension of the inquiry to all countries where the British spycops are known to have operated

5. The appointment of a diverse panel with experience relevatnt ot victims to assist the chair in making decisions and judgements

6. Inclusion of children and young people who had contact with spycops as Core Participants in the Inquiry

7. Urgent and immediate review of convictions where spycops had involvement in the cases & misled courts – 50 wrongful convictions have already been overturned and this is likely to be a fraction of the true total.

8. The Inquiry must extend its scope to understand political policing and its impact on democracy. This must include a thorough investigation into racist, sexist, anti-working class, anti-democratic behaviour on behalf of the spycops and those that instructed them to operate in this manner. Such political policing and political policing units must be abolished.

9. An urgent review into all undercover police activities to investigate whether the bad practice exposed by this inquiry has been extended to other areas of undercover operations

10. Make available the necessary resources of the judge to be able to do their job in the available time

11. Equalising of resources, the police are spending millions on stonewalling the inquiry, victims have almost nothing

12. Increase the severity of penalties for non-compliance with the inquiry

13. Investigation into collusion between police and corporate spies

Tilly Gifford

Today sees a vital court hearing in the battle for truth and justice for victims of political spycops in Scotland.

Our new sister organisation, Scottish Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, explains the background:

After a series of “activists” were exposed as long-term undercover police spies, and the revelation that police undercover officers had been spying on political campaigners from 1968 to the present day, a Public Inquiry into undercover policing was ordered.

The UK government, however, chose to limit the Inquiry to England and Wales. Many of the same police spies now being investigated by the Inquiry also operated in Scotland. We know that they spied in Scotland, we know that they lied in Scotland, and we know some of them were with their unsuspecting activist partners in Scotland – something the Met concedes is a breach of fundamental human rights that police are sworn to uphold.

The Scottish government made repeated formal requests to the Home Office to extend the Inquiry to cover Scotland. Every party in the Scottish Parliament backed the call. They were repeatedly refused.

Rather than have their own inquiry, the Scottish government hired HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland – an organisation of career police officers – to do a report. It was the most brazen whitewash imaginable. It ignored all policing before 2000 and failed to even mention officers deceiving women into relationships.

Tilly Gifford, a social justice activist with the Plane Stupid climate campaign group, was targeted by spycops in Scotland in 2009. In 2016 Tilly took legal action to challenge the UK government over its failure to extend the Inquiry to include Scotland, and also to review why the Scottish Government failed to have its own independent public inquiry.

She was denied legal aid as the case supposedly had no merit. After considerable legal wrangling, and some crowdfunding, she got the decision overturned. The full hearing is happening today and tomorrow, the 19th and 20th of July.

Realising this crucial moment was coming, a month ago, Tilly and other activists, researchers and lawyers called a public meeting in Glasgow to form the Scottish Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance (“SCOPS”).

SCOPS, along with its UK-wide counterpart Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, is an alliance of people spied on by Britain’s political secret police. SCOPS’ focus, however, is on political policing carried out by Scottish police forces and on political policing in Scotland. The first task for SCOPS is, of course, to support Tilly in her judicial review.

SCOPS believes that victims of political policing in Scotland deserve nothing less than a full, independent, Scottish public inquiry. We’ve looked in increasing horror at the undercover policing inquiry in England and Wales, and we are determined to learn from its mistakes.

It must be led by a panel of experts. One sheriff – or judge, in the case of the Inquiry down South – is not nearly representative enough. Time and again we’ve seen the Inquiry’s chair display his lack of awareness of modern life. Scotland can and must do better. Whatever the outcome of this week’s judicial review, SCOPS will continue to campaign for a proper independent public inquiry.

We hope you’ll join us on the 19th and 20th of July at the Court of Session in Edinburgh. But whether you’re able to join us or not – if you, or someone you know, has been affected by political policing in Scotland, or can share information on political policing by Scottish police forces, please do get in touch.

We believe political policing is likely to disproportionately affect Scotland, where trade union activism has always been strong. It’s notable that the construction industry blacklist – in which police help to illegally prevent political activists from working – has a disproportionate number of Scottish names. We strongly suspect recent campaigns in Scotland – from Faslane to the Independence Referendum – will have been targeted by spycops. Every piece of information that comes to light seems to prompt further revelations.

Our campaign is just beginning, and it won’t end until political policing in Scotland ends.

SCOPS on Twitter

SCOPS on Facebook

This weekend in London we’re celebrating 50 years of resistance. Since the Metropolitan Police formed their counter-democratic undercover Special Demonstration Squad in 1968, more than 1,000 groups have been spied upon. Despite this, those targeted have achieved great things.

On Saturday 7 July we will have a roll call of groups in Grosvenor Square, where 1968’s demonstration against the Vietnam War triggered the formation of the spycops unit.

On Sunday we will be at Conway Hall for a day of exhibitions, discussions and much more.

See our 50 Years of Resistance page for more.

Here’s the full programme of the weekend’s events (which you can also download download as a PDF):

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.

Activists Jason Kirkpatrick & Kate Wilson, Belfast High Court, 7 February 2017

An undercover officer from a disgraced political policing unit infiltrated Northern Irish civil rights groups, including the Bloody Sunday march organisers.

Under the name ‘Sean Lynch’, the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad undercover officer infiltrated several organisations from 1968-74.

These included the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign and Sinn Féin (London). NICRA was the organiser of the Bloody Sunday march in 1972 when the British army shot dead 14 unarmed demonstrators.

The revelation came last week from the Undercover Policing Inquiry, which is examining the ‘spycops’ units that targeted political campaigns for 50 years from 1968. Officers lived for years at a time as activists; many were arrested and went to court under their fake identities. The majority of profiled officers had sexual relationships with women they spied on.

SPYING CROSSED BORDERS, SO MUST THE INQUIRY

Though spycops were mostly Metropolitan Police officers, some travelled throughout the UK and beyond. The public inquiry attracted criticism in 2015 when then-Home Secretary Theresa May limited it to events in England & Wales.

Former Northern Irish justice ministers Claire Sugden and David Ford have both backed the call to extend it to the whole UK, but to no avail. This week’s shock announcement may change that.

The fact of the SDS’ involvement in NICRA was not revealed to the Saville Inquiry of 2000-2010 that was supposed to fully examine Bloody Sunday. This mirrors the SDS’ spying on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence but failing to tell the subsequent Macpherson Inquiry.

Officers have already been known to spy beyond the borders of England and Wales, but the fresh information about ‘Sean Lynch’, who is now deceased, shows the Met unit had an involved interest in the politics of Northern Ireland.

The Home Office has rebuffed repeated requests from the Scottish Government for Scotland to be included in the Inquiry. In March, Amnesty called for it to extend to Northern Ireland:

‘Activities of undercover police were not limited to England and Wales, so nor should the inquiry… The need for full transparency and accountability of policing in Northern Ireland must not be compromised.’

At that time only one spycops officer, Mark Jenner, was known to have been involved in Irish politics.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland say local forces were ‘completely blind’ to the SDS officers’ presence, and do not appear to have been given any information for use afterwards. PSNI’s Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton said deploying undercover officers without local forces’ risk assessments would be ‘an act of madness’.

Eamonn McCann was a member of both the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association & Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign, and later went on to have a seat in Northern Ireland’s Legislative Assembly.

Responding to the admission that his groups had been targeted by ‘Sean Lynch,’ McCann told Irish News:

‘It’s now obvious that undercover police officers, intelligence and security officers were infiltrating everything.’

ACTIVIST’S ACTION FOR ANSWERS

Environmental activist Jason Kirkpatrick has been granted core participant status at the Undercover Policing Inquiry due to being spied on by officer Mark Kennedy – in Northern Ireland as well as England.

In 2005 Kennedy took Kirkpatrick and fellow campaigner Kim Bryan on a speaking tour in Northern Ireland, with the officer paying the bills and driving them around. They held public events at Belfast City Church as well as a public ‘environmental pub quiz’ at Menagerie Bar in the Belfast Holy Lands.

Kirkpatrick has launched a judicial review of the decision to exclude Northern Ireland from the Inquiry. He feels his 16 month wait for the case to come to court is extreme, and this week’s announcement adds great weight to his case:

‘With these fresh revelations, it is clear that an arbitrarily limited inquiry that fails to take account of operations by their undercover police in Northern Ireland is nothing short of a whitewash. The wait caused by Home Office delays to my current Northern Irish Judicial Review case is becoming absolutely unbearable.’

Kim Bryan said there can be no excuse for keeping the details hidden any longer:

‘Discovering the spycops infiltrated civil rights campaigns changes everything. Bloody Sunday was a pivotal event and yet the Met hid their involvement from the Inquiry. This might be the tip of the iceberg. The truth is long overdue. The Undercover Policing Inquiry must be extended to Northern Ireland.’

Nobody thought that sort of thing happened in this country. For 40 years, the public were unaware of secret police units dedicated to infiltrating and undermining a swathe of political groups.

The spycops units were more counter-democratic than counter-terrorist. More than 1,000 organisations were targeted: peace campaigns, environmentalists, anti-racists, trade unions – even Labour MPs & the Young Liberals.

When undercover officer Mark Kennedy was unmasked in 2010, the lid was lifted. Spycops had lied to courts and withheld evidence. Kennedy alone was responsible for 49 wrongful convictions. If Kennedy is average, this means over 7,000 miscarriages of justice have been secured by the 144 spycops. Even if we conservatively say it’s only one per officer per year undercover, it’s around 600.

Spycops stole the identities of dead children to create their fake personas. Perhaps most shockingly, they deceived women they spied on into sexual relationships – many integrated into families with plans for a lifetime together. The women’s personal stories are absolutely harrowing.

PUBLIC SHOULD MEAN PUBLIC

These were not rogue officers; these activities were how the units operated. The spycops were trained, monitored and guided to do this, with their managers being drawn from earlier generations of the same unit. This was an institutional failing.

The police have thrown every obstacle into the path of victims seeking answers. It took four years for the deceived women to get an apology, admitting:

‘these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma’.

The Met have since specified that they violated the right to a private life, and the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment – a fundamental right that officers are sworn to uphold.

In 2014 it was revealed they had spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence, and a full-scale public inquiry was ordered. Scheduled to finish in 2018, it has yet to formally begin; the ‘ambitious’ finishing date is now set for December 2023. The police have obstructed it just as they have the victims’ legal claims. They even applied to have the entire process held in secret, seemingly unable to understand the term ‘public inquiry’.

The Inquiry’s new Chair, Sir John Mitting, is steering it towards collapse. Before we can begin, we need the list of cover names spycops used so that people can identify infiltrators and report what they did. Victims have repeatedly made this plain.

But Mitting is granting maximum anonymity to many officers, asserting that those in long marriages are presumed incapable of misconduct. Mitting needs to be replaced by, or at least sit alongside, a panel of people with life experience relevant to victims.

THE LUSH POSTER IS SIMPLE

At this crucial moment Lush, with their history of supporting human rights causes, have worked closely with victims on their new campaign. The poster is simple – a face that’s half police officer, half someone else. The message is not hard to grasp, even if you divorce it from the words and other material that surround the image.

Mashing up two ideas to create a third is a basic device that children enjoy with collage. Those who claim not to understand this visual language must be very confused by other adverts, GIFs and emoji.

When the BBC abuse scandal broke, we understood that even though most 1970s presenters didn’t sexually assault anyone, and the BBC does a lot of good work, there was an institutional failing. This doesn’t mean every current BBC employee is an abuser. Yet some police officers are trying hard to pretend that’s what Lush is doing in calling out the spycops.

The response of officers who have intimidated Lush staff into taking down posters is an extension of what we’ve seen from their management over the last eight years.

If they care about the service being brought into disrepute, they should aim their anger at those who grossly abuse police power to violate citizens, lie to courts and undermine democratic groups, rather than those of us who point it out.

A slightly shorter version of this article appeared in The i Paper on 5 June 2018.

Former Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis

Peter Francis, undercover police officer turned whistleblower, has declared he won’t have anything more to do with the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s anonymity applications from his former colleagues.

The former spycop, who infiltrated anti-racist groups in the 1990s and spied on the loved ones of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, says the public inquiry is protecting the guilty and concealing the truth.

Francis said:

‘I know at least half of all SDS officers. Armed with such knowledge, I had hoped to assist the Inquiry to critically assess the applications being made by former undercover police officers to keep their cover names secret. But the level of redactions accepted by the Inquiry Team is so high, even I am often unable to decipher from whom the applications are made…

‘Even when a risk assessment concludes that risks faced by an individual are “low”, the Inquiry has refused to publish his or her cover name. In such circumstances, I cannot justify continuing to incur tax payers’ money drafting written submissions or attending hearings which are clearly not going to change the approach adopted by the Chairman.’

THE SPY WHO STEPPED OUT OF THE SHADOWS

Francis was deployed by the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a political secret police within the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch, from 1993 to 1998. He infiltrated Youth Against Racism in Europe, Movement for Justice and Militant (now the Socialist Party).

Francis was tasked to ‘find dirt’ with which to discredit the Lawrence family and Duwayne Brooks, Stephen’s friend and the main witness to the teenager’s murder.

In April the Inquiry named an officer known to have spied on the Lawrence family. Formerly known as N81, the officer – mentored by Francis – used the name David Hagan.

Francis told a 2015 conference of police corruption and racism campaigners, via his lawyer Rosa Curling:

‘I have let every single one of you down, especially the Lawrence family, by my cowardice in not appearing before the original Macpherson public inquiry when I knew in my heart at the time that I should have done so. No matter what my senior police managers were saying to me at the time, I should have been there, I should have spoken out.

‘Just imagine how many things might have changed for political protesters, especially all the black justice campaigns, had I had the bottle to do it then.’

Francis initially came forward to tell his story, only identified as ‘Officer A’, to the Observer in March 2010. It was the first time many people had heard of the SDS.

At the end of that year activists unmasked spycop Mark Kennedy, and Francis became a prime source of information for the Guardian’s detailed investigations into the unit, its remit and methods. This culminated in the Guardian journalists Rob Evans & Paul Lewis’ definitive book Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police in 2013. At that time, Francis dropped his pseudonym and shared details of his personal deployment.

He was keen to talk to Operation Herne, the Met’s self-investigation into spycops, if the Met would withdraw their threat to prosecute him under the Official Secret Act for sharing secret information. This was superseded when the full-scale public inquiry was commissioned.

THE SECRET PUBLIC INQUIRY

Since the original Inquiry Chair, Lord Pitchford, resigned for health reasons in 2017, there has been growing concern about his replacement Sir John Mitting. His credulous approval of police demands for anonymity coupled with a penchant for secrecy have seen a groundswell of protest, all of which has been ignored. He oversees a slow, shambolic and secretive excuse for a public inquiry.

Matters exploded in the February hearing of the inquiry when it discussed officers known as HN23 and HN40. Victims’ lawyer Phillippa Kaufmann QC asked why we couldn’t even be told the reason these officers were being granted total anonymity, to which Mitting famously responded:

‘They are examples of deployments where you are going to meet a brick wall of silence.’

Francis’ lawyer Maya Sikand told the court that Francis knew who the officers were and that they:

‘would have valuable evidence to give you about the violence that was permitted by Special Demonstration Squad managers to be used by Special Demonstration Squad officers.’

Francis broke protocol, rising to his feet to interject in person:

‘I have great, huge, concerns that these professional liars are spinning you, the Inquiry and definitely these poor solicitors they are working with here.’

Mitting insisted Francis sit, which he voluntarily, observing that the court’s ‘Krispy Kreme security’ would not have been capable of forcing him.

Matters came to a head at the following hearing in March, where Kaufmann led her legal team and the victims they represent out of court, telling Mitting:

‘We are not prepared actively to participate in a process where the presence of our clients is pure window dressing, lacking all substance, lacking all meaning and which would achieve absolutely nothing other than lending this process the legitimacy that it doesn’t have and doesn’t deserve.’

Francis stayed and made some forthright contributions, only to see that Mitting ignored it all and granted anonymity to many officers as planned.

The Undercover Research Group analysed Mitting’s decisions so far, and they calculate that he is on course to grant full anonymity to around 25% of SDS officers.

Mitting’s “minded-to” note on the NPOIU officers

Last week, Mitting turned his attention to the SDS’ successor unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which ran from 1999-2011. His ‘minded-to’ note shows intentions to grant anonymity to a much greater proportion of these officers.

It is inexcusable, unacceptable, and proof of what the victims have been saying for months; Mitting is wholly unfit to investigate and expose police wrongdoing.

It is into this atmosphere that we now hear Peter Francis’ withdrawal from the process of anonymity applications:

‘Three years ago, Stafford Scott (another Core Participant) said that walking into the Inquiry was like walking into a boxing ring, facing the Metropolitan Police with one hand tied behind your back and a blindfold covering your eyes. Sadly, his assessment has proved correct.

‘The approach adopted by the Inquiry to restriction orders has undermined its ability to uncover the truth about undercover policing in the UK. I had hoped my involvement in this process would in part remedy the unfair advantages identified by Mr Scott but this has not proved possible.’

There is another preliminary hearing of the Inquiry this Wednesday, 9 May. It is another session on the anonymity of officers. We have no faith that Mitting has altered from his method of listening to the police, making up his mind, then having a pantomime hearing before approving his predetermined ruling. We will not waste our time on it.

Neither the victims nor Peter Francis are abandoning the inquiry, just the process of appraising applications for anonymity. We want to engage with the Inquiry, as long as it is intent on revealing the truth about Britain’s political secret police. Sir John Mitting is an obstacle to that and he cannot be left in charge.

Join us for a protest before the hearing – 9am, Wednesday 9 May at the Royal Courts of Justice, Strand WC2A 2LL.

Follow Peter Francis on Twitter.

A woman who was deceived into a relationship by an undercover police officer is bringing a legal case to have him charged with Misconduct in Public Office as well as sexual offences, including rape.

‘Monica‘ was deceived into a relationship by undercover officer Jim Boyling when he was infiltrating Reclaim The Streets in the late 1990s.

She told the BBC:

‘At the time I thought he had genuine feelings for me. But now I look at that and I think actually this man was trained. He was a successful police officer. He was duping us all.

‘And I was encouraged to be intimate and sexual with somebody who I would never ever have got involved with if I had known who he was: if I had known his true motives and his true identity.’

In August 2014 the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would not be charging Boyling or other spycops with misconduct or sexual offences. Monica is now taking the CPS to court to challenge that decision with a judicial review.

REVISITING THE FACTS

Jim Boyling whilst undercover in the 1990s

Monica began a civil claim against the Met in early 2016, in the mould of those already brought by other women who had been similarly deceived who have received an unpredented apology from the police. Whether what the officers did constitutes rape is a separate matter from such civil cases.

The fact that the women consented to sexual relationships at the time they happened is irrelevant – consent can be vitiated by later knowledge. There are several recent instances of women deceiving other women into having sex by pretending to be men, all of which have ended in convictions, including some with lengthy prison sentences.

Those circumstances are uncommon, but Monica’s situation is even more unusual. What these undercover police officers did is so rare – and its exposure rarer still – that we haven’t got a common perception of it, nor an established legal position.

Monica’s lawyer Harriet Wistrich compared it to the women who were convicted for sexual deceit:

‘At the time that relationship was a genuine relationship but subsequently the other person discovered who they really were. Those women were prosecuted by the CPS and imprisoned for those offences. We’re saying, what is the essential difference in a case like this?

Indeed, Wistrich says the spycops are even more culpable for their actions:

‘In this case the officers knew full well what they were doing, they weren’t mentally vulnerable, they were using the resources given to them by the state for an improper purpose, ie for their own gratification, to advance their career, and to make their undercover operation successful.’

In 2014, the CPS cited case law it considered before making its decision. They mentioned that a court decided that a man’s failure to use a condom after he’d said he would could be rape and he should be brought to trial. In another case where a man promised to withdraw before ejaculation, but failed to, it was also decided as being capable of amounting to rape. These cases give us an indication of the threshold of criminal sexual deceit, yet they said the spycops’ deceit wasn’t of the same ilk.

In other words, the CPS expected us to believe that Jim Boyling’s profound, prolonged sexual deception of three women is not worthy of a court case, but that they would prosecute him if he had once failed to use a condom as promised.

It’s plainly nonsense, insulting the intelligence of those who hear it. It betrays the women who were abused and a society that wants to see sexual abuse taken seriously.

BOYLING v POLICE

After his relationship with Monica, Boyling began another relationship with ‘Rosa‘. After his spying ended and he left, a distraught Rosa looked for him for a considerable time.

After she found him he admitted being an undercover police officer:

‘The new tales he told me – of being the partner I knew and slept next to every night, the misunderstanding of his deployment, that he was the only one, that our country doesn’t spy on peace or green movements, of being a turncoat and needing my help to escape the police – they were more believable than the truth.’

‘The unlikely truth was this: my life partner was fabricated by the state. He never existed. I was pregnant within two weeks of his reappearance and bore children by the actor, a random police officer, who had played my partner.’

They rapidly married and had two children. The marriage broke down quickly as he was controlling and physically violent. She fled with the children to a women’s shelter.

When the spycops scandal broke in early 2011 and Boyling’s relationship with Rosa was made public, he was suspended from the police. He faces disciplinary charges for not informing his managers of the extent of the relationship and for revealing secret information to her.

This week, more than seven years into his suspension, his disciplinary hearing is going ahead. He has chosen not to attend, nor contest the charges in any way.

However, he has given an angry interview to Police Community (for the website’s account-holders, but readable here without signing up), saying:

‘The disciplinary charge from the Met specifies that I had a relationship which constituted misconduct because it was ‘without a police purpose’. The position of the Met appears to be that a relationship entered into as an operational tactic is acceptable, but a genuine one resulting in marriage and children constitutes misconduct.’

As Boyling well knows, even with his glossing of the facts, no form of relationship between undercover officers and the women they spy on is acceptable.

Chief Constable Mick Creedon unequivocally explained in 2014:

‘There are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate for such covertly deployed officers to engage in intimate sexual relationships with those they are employed to infiltrate and target.

‘Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.’

The Met have since gone further, conceding that these relationships were a violation of human rights, including the right to privacy and the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment.

With such a shocking admission, it is outrageous that nobody is being held responsible. If these men were not police officers they would surely already be in jail.

Monica said:

‘I am appalled by the hypocrisy of police and government, who on one hand wring their hands, apologise, say this was terrible and must never happen again, yet on the other provide no disclosure, protect the perpetrators, and hold no one to account. The whitewashing of these serious human rights abuses must stop.’