The public inquiry into undercover policing is in a stage of active preparation, with the hearings expected to start properly next summer.

We’ve already had the inquiry’s Terms of Reference set out by the Home Secretary. It will

inquire into and report on undercover police operations conducted by English and Welsh police forces in England and Wales since 1968.

This

will include, but not be limited to, the undercover operations of the Special Demonstration Squad and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit.

More than half the exposed officers from those units worked outside England and Wales. They spied in at least seventeen different countries over a period of 25 years (the Undercover Research Group has produced a detailed list of dozens of instances). If this is the case with the known officers, it’s safe to presume many of their colleagues did it too.

Some officers are known to have committed crimes whilst working undercover abroad. It’s more than two years since German MP Andrej Hunko told the UK parliament.

Mark Kennedy was accused and found guilty of an arson attack in Berlin. But he was giving evidence in court under his false name to escape legal proceeding under his real name.

This is exactly the sort of thing that is the subject of the inquiry – if it’s in England and Wales. If the British police are farming these activities out on a large scale to dozens of countries it surely warrants proper investigation.

Conversely, Hunko has discovered that German police sent numerous undercover officers to the anti-G8 protests in Scotland in 2005. It is hardly likely to have been a one-off.

If an officer’s actions are an outrage in England and Wales, the same deed is equally an outrage if committed elsewhere. Who is responsible if an English undercover officer commits crimes whilst working abroad? What protects the public from foreign spies here? What deals are done between governments? If these officers aren’t reined in when working in the UK, are they even more cavalier toward citizens, laws and rights when away from their overseers?

As it stands, the Pitchford Inquiry appears uninterested in the answers. Its stated aim is to explore “the motivation for and scope of, undercover policing operations in practice and their effect upon individuals in particular and the public in general”. The geographical blinkers are a barrier to this. If it refuses to look at a significant element of the work of many officers, the inquiry cannot get a thorough overview and so undermines its very purpose.

This restriction in the Terms of Reference was handed to Pitchford and his team by the Home Secretary. It’s time for the inquiry, and others, to insist that she drops this clause.

If it is to be credible, the Pitchford Inquiry must give equal weight to equivalent actions and experiences of undercover officers and their victims, wherever they happened to be. The limit of England and Wales has to go.

= = = = = = = = = = =

British undercover officers and the countries they worked in

Mark Kennedy

A 2012 report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary refers to Kennedy professionally visiting 11 countries on more than 40 occasions, including 14 visits to Scotland. As with so much else, officialdom has not been forthcoming and the real work has been done by spied-on activists and allied journalists. It appears these countries included:

1. Scotland
2. Northern Ireland
3. Ireland
4. Iceland
5. Spain
6. Germany
7. Denmark
8. Poland
9. USA
10. France
11. Belgium

Mark Jenner
1. Israel
2. Greece
3. Netherlands
4. Thailand
5. Vietnam
6.Ireland
7. Northern Ireland
8. Scotland

In Northern Ireland, Jenner took campaigners on a trip to republican West Belfast and Derry which included meeting Sinn Fein councillors. He also took part in fighting when nationalists clashed with a loyalist Apprentice Boys of Derry march.

Marco Jacobs
1. Poland
2. Germany
3. France
4. Scotland

Rod Richardson
1. Italy
2. Netherlands
3. France

Peter Francis
1. Germany
2. Greece

Jim Boyling
1. Ireland
2. Italy

John Dines
1. Scotland
2. Ireland

Lynn Watson
1. Scotland

Jason Bishop
1. Scotland

Prosecutors have finally admitted that a defendant in a court case was an undercover police officer. Jim Boyling was a Special Demonstration Squad officer, deployed under the name Jim Sutton.

In 1997 he was on trial with a group of other Reclaim The Streets activists after being arrested a protest at a London Transport office. Having sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he lied and lied and lied.

Whilst most, including Boyling, were acquitted, John Jordan was convicted. Last year the conviction was quashed but the Crown Prosecution Service refused to say why. Their given document of reasons was literally a blank sheet of paper.

The fact that Metropolitan police chief Bernard Hogan-Howe had already publicly declared that ‘Sutton’ was an undercover officer made no odds. They admitted that Boyling was a police officer but – farcically sticking to the crumbling policy of ‘neither confirm nor deny’ – would not concede that he was an undercover officer, as if he might have had the full time activist persona of Jim Sutton of his own volition as some sort of hobby.

But in August police were forced to say that Boyling and his former boss Bob Lambert had both been undercover officers. Late last month the Jordan case was back in court and prosecutors finally admitted that Boyling had been deployed as an undercover police officer throughout the trial.

To have a police officer be party to all the defence meetings, in a position to help formulate that defence, is an extremely serious breach of lawyer-client confidentiality. That the trial went ahead is a serious abuse of the judicial system.

A fortnight ago the Crown’s QC, Richard Whittam, told the court

Had the Crown Prosecution Service known that ‘Jim Sutton’ was an undercover police officer, there is a strong likelihood that John Jordan would not have been prosecuted.

Note the careful wording – the CPS is not saying that it didn’t know Boyling was an officer, just implying it. The court was specifically told that this wasn’t actually an admission of anything at all.

WE’VE SEEN THIS BEFORE

Certainly, we know that the CPS have colluded with police to hide the existence of undercover officers from courts before, and that they’ve insisted that arrested officers are primed for being charged alongside bona fide activists.

On 12 April 2009 a group of 114 climate activists gathered in Nottingham to prepare to occupy Ratcliffe on Soar coal fired power station, but they were all pre-emptively arrested. One of their number was Mark Stone, aka police officer Mark Kennedy.

After he was exposed 18 months later, two official reports looked into collusion between the CPS and police in the Ratcliffe case. The Independent Police Complaints Commission’s report found the CPS knew about the activists’ plan before it happened, before many of the activists themselves.

Ex-judge Sir Christopher Rose’s was also asked to investigate the Ratcliffe case. His report quotes an email to police from the CPS about how ‘we will always be vulnerable on disclosure, especially matters covert’ and that even the lowly local CPS office ‘are aware there is an asset involved’. The CPS’ Case Management Review Panel of senior lawyers discussed

risks regarding the “right” questions being asked by the defence regarding covert practices.

Tellingly, while many of the activists were told that they would not be prosecuted, Kennedy was still retained in the ‘charging pool’. In early July 2009, Nick Paul – the Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator in the CPS Special Crime Unit – was asked by a Detective Chief Inspector not to charge Kennedy, but Paul rebuffed him.

To feel able to overrule such a high ranking police officer shows the level of confidence in Nick Paul and illustrates the degree to which this CPS official was controlling matters. Three months after Kennedy’s arrest the CPS were stubbornly intent on on charging him, which indicates that the CPS are not as averse to such things as their recent claim about Boyling would have us believe.

Of the initial 114 arrested, 26 were called for trial (Kennedy was not among them). It was split into two hearings. Twenty admitted participation but said their actions were justified. A further six said they had not participated in the plan.

As ‘the justifiers’ court date approached, prosecutor Felicity Gerry was told about the existence of an undercover officer. She knew Mark Kennedy’s real identity a week before any activists did. For the six weeks before trial, and every second she was in court, she knew that a police officer had filed evidence on the case that the defence were unaware of, yet she failed to mention it to the court. The twenty were wrongfully convicted.

When ‘the deniers’ came to court in January 2011, they asked to see Kennedy’s evidence that they knew exonerated them. Rather than disclose it, the Crown dropped the charges and the trial dramatically collapsed.

In a further display of shadiness, the CPS were said they had found

Previously unavailable information that significantly undermined the prosecution’s case

but specifically said it was

not the existence of an undercover officer.

This is now known to be a lie. If they lie about that, what else do they lie about?

It’s a pattern we’ve seen again this week as the case against British Guantanmo detainee Moazzam Begg was dropped at the last minute because MI5 had failed to hand over relevant documents. Although, again, the CPS refuses to actually admit its reasons for not going to trial.

TWO BUCKETS OF WHITEWASH

Sir Christopher Rose’s inquiry did not speak to interview the man at the centre, CPS Special Crime Unit Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator Nick Paul. Rose – who, as a Surveillance Commissioner had the ultimate sign-of on the validity of Kennedy and co’s deployment and thereby suffered a conflict of interest – concluded that mistakes had been made but there was nothing untoward and ‘the failures were individual, not systemic’.

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer, went on Newsnight to defend the report. Paxman’s opening question was

Are you absolutely certain there are no other cases in which people have been convicted on the basis of the evidence of undisclosed undercover police officers?

He repeats the question three times in the opening minute and a half of the exchange but still doesn’t get an answer. Starmer merely says that Rose has decided there’s no systemic problem.

Yet, as was already well known, there had already been the Drax 29 case. In June 2008 another group of climate protesters halted a coal train bound for Drax power station in Yorkshire. Again, Mark Kennedy had been involved and, again, this had been kept from the court and another miscarriage of justice was engineered with all 29 convicted. This involved a completely different team of CPS prosecutors. The reality is that the problem is systemic.

That said, both cases were overseen by the same Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator, Nick Paul, in the London CPS office. He shared that office with the Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer, yet Starmer appears not to have asked Paul about the systemic problems of prosecutors and police withholding evidence in these cases. Soon after the Ratcliffe debacle was exposed, Paul left the CPS, going into private law practice at Doughty Street Chambers. After Starmer stepped down as DPP, he joined Paul there.

HOW MANY MORE? AND WHO DID IT?

The recent admission of Jim Boyling not merely supplying withheld evidence but actually being a defendant takes it all to another level.

If all this is what we know from the handful of secret police officers so far exposed, how big could the problem be? When Mark Ellison QC looked into the spying on the family of Stephen Lawrence, it was immediately apparent to him that wrongful convictions were a serious issue and what was known could be but a tiny fraction of what has occurred. He is currently investigating.

Whistleblower officer Peter Francis praised Ellison’s initiative and criticised

the so called ‘independent’ inquiry being undertaken by Operation Herne, which has so far proved ineffective and appears to be a damage limitation and containment exercise, rather than a proper investigation into past wrongs.

These miscarriages of justice were conducted because of the actions of my former colleagues in the SDS and also officers in the NPOIU and their superiors. I hope that the second inquiry being undertaken by Mr Ellison QC will prove far more robust and transparent in its investigation and findings.

Jim Boyling went through a trial in his undercover persona. He also gave a witness statement for another trial under his false identity (ironically the defence barrister was Kier Starmer). His mentor Bob Lambert admits that he was also prosecuted under his false identity (but says he can’t remember if he was convicted). If that isn’t perjury and perverting the course of justice, it would be interesting to know what is.

But more importantly this collection of cases, spanning different constabularies and eras, surely fits anyone’s definition of a systemic problem and indisputably rubbishes the conclusion of the Rose report.

Who is to blame? The police themselves or the Crown prosecutors who waved it through and, it appears, actively retained officers for prosecution against police wishes?

The CPS are still not saying why they quashed John Jordan’s conviction. It had previously been guessed that they were protecting the identity of Jim Boyling. Now that is known not to be the case, what possible reason is there for not saying what really went on in that case? Is this just force of habit, refusing to disclose anything until compelled? Or is there some other, more sinister and corrupt, reason?

Legal action by the Guardian, BBC and Press Association continues to try and force disclosure.

JUSTICE FOR A FEW, WHAT ABOUT THE MANY?

The Drax and Ratcliffe convictions have now been quashed. Had activists not exposed Kennedy, these convictions and the 20 from Ratcliffe would stand. The six ‘deniers’ would surely have also been convicted. Mark Kennedy was responsible for 49 wrongful convictions that we know of.

If the other political secret police officers have done the same, it means around 7,000 miscarriages of justice since these counter-democratic spy units were formed in 1968. Even if we conservatively estimate one per officer per year of service, it will be around 600. We could well be looking at the largest corruption of the judicial system in history.

The attention paid to the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute undercover police officers focused, rightly, on the invasion of privacy and bodily integrity in their sexual contact with women they spied on.

But in the same statement, the CPS ruled out several other charges.

MISCONDUCT IN PUBLIC OFFICE

In order to prosecute misconduct in public office, the prosecution would have to show that an officer knowingly abused their position in order to bring a sexual relationship about

The police have readily and unequivocally admitted such relationships are abhorrent and an abuse of their position. Speaking for the Association of Chief Police Officers, a body that ran several of the political policing units, Jon Murphy said

It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do. It is morally wrong because people have been put there to do a particular task and people have got trust in them. It is never acceptable under any circumstances … for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with.

In March this year the second Operation Herne internal report into undercover policing declared

there are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate… 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

So there we have a police report saying it’s a gross abuse of the officer’s position, but the CPS said there’s insufficient evidence that any officer knowingly abused their position.

Everyone admits the relationships happened and they were a gross abuse. If it is a gross abuse then there is a gross abuser. That must be either the manager who authorised it or the individual undercover officer who did it.

Whichever one it is, former officer Bob Lambert is culpable. He was an undercover officer who had a prolonged relationship including fathering a child with a woman he targeted. After he was promoted to running the squad he mentored Jim Boyling who did the same thing.

If Operation Herne is right and it is both an individual and organisational failing then we should see several officers held responsible for each relationship. Even if they blame the individual officer and claim they disobeyed their guidance, it is negligence on the part of the managers.

But if this came to court, we could expect to see officers from both roles blaming each other. That would be a whole lot of dirty laundry being done in public, and would be likely to point to further abuses. This scandal has already become far too large for establishment comfort. It’s no surprise that the CPS – who helped ensure Mark Kennedy’s evidence was kept from court in the Ratcliffe case, leading to a miscarriage of justice and 20 wrongful convictions – has decided to defy the police’s own admissions of misconduct and keep these officers away from court as well.

BREACH OF THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT

The CPS also said that

In order to prosecute a breach of the Official Secrets Act the prosecution would have to prove that the suspect in question disclosed information that would, or would be likely to, damage the work of the security and intelligence services

This is thought to be because officers have named colleagues to civilians. Jim Boyling told the activist he married about several other officers’ identities. This led her to tell Helen Steel that her partner John Barker had in fact been police officer John Dines.

Peter Francis

Additionally, when Mark Kennedy was confronted by activists who had discovered his true identity, he confirmed activist Lynn Watson had actually been a fellow police officer.

Whistleblower officer Peter Francis has been threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. The fact that neither Boyling nor Kennedy are to face charges for naming colleagues to the activists they targeted implies Francis faces something of an empty threat. The CPS appear to have declared it’s open season for him, and for any other officers who want to right some of their wrongs, to step forward and name names.

Jim Boyling whilst undercover in the 1990s

For the first time ever, the Metropolitan Police have named undercover officers. Following last month’s court hearing, the Met have been compelled to admit that two Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) officers who deceived women they spied on into long-term relationships were, indeed, police officers.

Bob Lambert, who was undercover as Bob Robinson using the identity of a dead boy, had sexual relationships with four women he targeted including a four year relationship co-habiting and having a planned child with one.

Jim Boyling infiltrated Reclaim the Streets under the name Jim Sutton and caused a miscarriage of justice by going through a court case under his false identity, ended up marrying a woman he’d been sent to spy on.

GENUINE LIES

The Met claims the relationships took place against the guidance of managers and were women were the result of ‘mutual attraction and genuine personal feelings’.

Belinda Harvey, who had a relationship with Lambert, said

How can a relationship be genuine when it is based on a massive web of lies? He pretended to be a man with noble ideals and political commitments, when in reality he was a police officer spying on our friendship network.

He pretended he was committed to the future when he always knew he would go back to his real job and wife and kids. That doesn’t show genuine feelings; it is abuse and I would never have consented to such a relationship had I known.

After his deployment, Lambert went on to run the Special Demonstration Squad’s operations. He was Boyling’s mentor and overseer, the very manager who the Met are implying was ignorant of the dangers of sexual relationships. Yet again the Met take a transparently implausible stance and defy the people they abused to disprove it, compounding their already horrific level of personal damage.

In a press release on the Police Spies Out of Lives site that speaks for eight women bringing the case against the police, their lawyer Harriet Wistrich said

The police have been pulled, kicking and screaming, to this first extremely significant development in the litigation brought by the women in their long battle for justice and accountability. It represents a partial victory with the police being forced to acknowledge the identities of undercover police officers who committed serious violations of women’s rights. However, the confirmation does not go far enough, it is mealy mouthed, offensive and lacking in any acknowledgment of the huge abuse of power and harm caused to my clients.

IF LAMBERT GOT IT WRONG, HOW CAN HE BE RIGHT?

Bob Lambert whilst undercover in the 1980s

When the SDS was still a secret unaccountable unit, Bob Lambert was seen as a role model. ‘He did what is hands down regarded as the best tour of duty ever,’ said a former officer. But as their activities get dragged into the light of public scrutiny and mainstream morality, they are seen for what they are. Not even the Met can defend their actions and claim that what happened to those women was in any way acceptable.

Lambert currently holds academic posts at London Metropolitan University and the University of St Andrews, trading on his ‘counter terrorism’ experience. The police proclamation that sexual relationships are unethical further undermines his credibility as an authority on undercover policing. Either he used sexual relationships as a tactic or else he coincidentally got over his ‘mutual attraction and genuine personal feelings’ at the same time as his deployment ended and abandoned his own child without any support from his well remunerated job.

Rather than being trusted to train the next generation of infiltrators, Bob Lambert is more like a case study in how wrong it can go. His continued employment discredits the institutions that hire him.

TWO DOWN, TWO TO GO

Helen Steel

Whilst the Met’s admission of undercover officers’ names is historic, it is the minimum they could get away with. They are still refusing to concede the identity of two other officers in the case, behaviour that’s just as absurd as their earlier refusal to admit the identities of Lambert and Boyling.

Everybody has known for years that Mark Cassidy was the undercover officer Mark Jenner. Everybody has known for years that John Barker was the undercover officer John Dines. The real John Barker was an 8 year old boy who died of leukaemia whose identity was stolen by Dines.

How long can they insult their victims and obstruct justice with such transparent nonsense? It is time to admit what they’ve done.

Helen Steel, who had a long-term relationship with John Dines, told this morning’s Radio 4 Today programme

These guys were saying that they loved us, that they wanted to be in our lives for the rest of their lives and yet they knew that their posting was going to be ending in just a few years time and that they were going to disappear from our lives and leave us bereft. That is not love, that is abuse.

A significant step was taken towards justice yesterday for five women who were deceived into sexual relationships with undercover police officers.

The police have been using an obstruction tactic of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’, claiming they have a long-standing, unwavering policy of not confirming whether anyone was ever an undercover officer. It is nonsense, as the women and their legal teams demonstrated, listing the many exceptions police and other officials have made.

Pointing out that the police have conceded sexual relationships were an abuse of position, Mr Justice Bean’s ruling said

there can be no public policy reason to permit the police neither to confirm nor deny whether an illegitimate or arguably illegitimate operational method has been used as a tactic in the past.

The court gave the Metropolitan Police 28 days to formally admit or deny that:

(a) officers of the Metropolitan Police Service, as part of their work as undercover officers and using false identities, engaged in long term intimate sexual relationships with those whose activities the MPS wished to observe;

(b) this was authorised or acquiesced to by senior management;

(c) ‘Jim Sutton‘ was such an officer; and

(d) ‘Bob Robinson‘ was such an officer.

If they fail to respond within that time, the court will take it as an admission that all these things are true.

The second point is particularly noteworthy. Despite police attempts to shift all blame on to the individual officers, the court overtly points to the fact that senior management must have known the relationships went on.

All but one of the officers so far exposed had sexual relations with activists they spied on, and most of them had long-term committed relationships. One of the worst, Bob Lambert, had a planned child with an activist he spied on, so he cannot have been ignorant of the possibility of such relationships when he was promoted to running operations.

The fact that his protegés embarked so enthusiastically on their relationships makes it clear that such practices were accepted and quite possibly encouraged, even planned and monitored. Of course, even if managers had been unaware of such relationships, that would have made them negligent and therefore still culpable. But, even with the facts we have so far, it is already a nonsense to pretend that senior management were unaware and disapproved.

That said, the police are not above nonsense to stall attempt at dragging the truth from them. Earlier this year they confirmed in court that Jim Boyling was a police officer but would not confirm he was an undercover officer – as if he might have come up with the Jim Sutton alias and spent years being an anti-capitalist activist as a personal hobby in his spare time.

Returning to yesterday’s ruling, the judge stopped short of compelling police to admit that all four officers named in this case were, in fact, police officers. Jim Boyling and Bob Lambert have both been previously named by officials and have confirmed themselves. Yet the other two are scarcely less public.

Everyone knows that Mark Cassidy was the undercover officer Mark Jenner. Everyone knows that John Barker was the undercover officer John Dines. The real John Barker was not an undercover police officer – he was a boy who died of leukaemia aged eight. Thier stories and pictures have been published in many places for years now. To leave any veil over them is absurd.

It was disappointing to see BBC Home Affairs correspondent Danny Shaw refer to the case as a mere ‘bid for compensation’. The integrity that drips from every word of the womens’ testimony and campaigning makes it plain that this is all about disclosure, truth and accountability.  They don’t want money, they want justice.

Despite shortcomings in the judgement and its coverage, it is nonetheless a major victory as it shreds the blanket use of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ which – as the women so comprehensively showed – was never a real policy, merely a convenient shroud for the police to obscure their history as they heap gruelling punishment on their victims for daring to ask for answers.

After three years the first real hurdle has just fallen, a tribute to the tenacity of these women and their lawyers. The outrageous denials from the police are becoming ever more starkly exposed for what they are. More will fall.

This week the women duped into long term relationships with undercover police officers are back in court in London and have called for a solidarity demonstration outside.

Eight of the women are supported by the Police Spies Out of Lives group. One of them, ‘Alison‘, lived with Mark Jenner for four years. She told her story to Newsnight earlier this year. Today she published an article on the Guardian site about the next stage of the court case.

The police are obliged to provide disclosure and properly outline their case. They have failed to do so, citing a policy of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ (NCND); they say they cannot ever confirm whether somebody was an undercover police officer, and that this policy is essential to the integrity of important and dangerous undercover work. They went as far as applying to have the case struck out on the grounds that, as they would refuse to give proper testimony in court, they would be denying themselves a fair trial.

There is only one flaw with this policy – it doesn’t really exist. It’s a common practice, but that is all. As Police Spies Out of Lives note

The women launched their legal action in December 2011, but it was not until June 2012 that the police first mentioned NCND in relation to the claim. You might think if there had been such a long standing policy this would have been highlighted in the first police response.

There have been innumerable exceptions to NCND, and the women gave the court two large files documenting some instances. After that, and the Ellison review‘s revelations earlier this year about spying on Stephen Lawrence’s family, the police abandoned their strike out the case. They’re still sticking to the ‘policy’ of NCND though.

This puts them in the bizarre position of not naming Mark Kennedy as an undercover police officer. Kennedy hired Max Clifford to sell a gossipy version of his story to the Mail on Sunday – he could scarcely be less secret. More than that, he has been identified in numerous official statements, including a report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) in February 2012 that said

It is normal practice for the police to neither confirm nor deny the true identity of undercover officers. This is to protect both the officers themselves, and the effectiveness of the tactic. However, the case of Mark Kennedy is one of exceptional circumstances, including his own public revelations, the media interest in him, and the fact that the Court of Appeal named him on 19 July 2011. Because of this, HMIC has chosen on this occasion to use his real name.

The information is out there and, like toothpaste out of the tube, you can’t put it back in. Mark Kennedy has not been magically de-identified. The current backslide shows that the stonewall use of NCND is both a recent invention and a tactic of obstruction.

Of the other four officers named in the womens’ case, John Dines and Mark Jenner have been extensively documented, and Bob Lambert has not only been identified in the press and the Ellison Review but has given interviews candidly admitting to large parts of his work.

The fifth, Jim Boyling, who was undercover as Jim Sutton, has also been comprehensively reported in the press, television and beyond. It would be hard to suspend him from police duty in January 2011 if he were not a police officer. Later in 2011 Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe confirmed that ‘Jim Sutton’ was an undercover officer [PDF, p22].

Because Boyling went through a 1997 court case under his false identity as Sutton, a convicted co-defendant has won the right to have the conviction overturned. But in a farcical twist at the hearing earlier this year – after this long-standing policy of NCND had been invented –  the police backtracked and would not fully identify Boyling. They confirmed he was a police officer but not an undercover one. As if he might have done the undercover work as a hobby in his spare time. As if confirming that this man whose picture is all over the internet was a police officer doesn’t put him at just as much of a risk as admitting he was an undercover one.

Police lawyers said they weren’t compelled to give any reason why they didn’t oppose the quashing. ‘What kind of justice is that?’ asked the judge. It’s a question we should all be asking.

NCND is another manifestation of the ‘double injustice’ faced by so many victims of police abuse; there is what was done to them, and then there are the tricks of delay, distraction and denial to try to avoid accountability. Many of those who have been spied on – the family of Stephen Lawrence and numerous other black justice campaigns, anti-fascists, environmentalists, Hillsborough families and more – can tell a similar story.

An police service interested in justice would do precisely the opposite. More, these blocks are such blatant decoy tactics, and they know it’s obvious to everyone. But as long as they aren’t forced into actually admitting that’s the case, they can conceal the truth of what they’ve done and deny justice to the citizens they abused.

If this is their response to being caught committing the starkly cruel abuse of these women – the most complete invasion of privacy that it is possible for the state to enact – then what hope can we have for the promised public inquiry?  The fight against NCND is not just a fight for the women concerned, but for everyone spied on by Britain’s political secret police, and for the hope of eventual truth and justice for the wider society.

Their hearing is on Thursday 5th and Friday 6th June at the Royal Courts of Justice on The Strand in London. Police Spies Out of Lives have asked:

• If you are in London, please join us outside the Royal Court of Justice, The Strand, from 9am–10am on Thursday 5th June to show your support for the women.
• Please share the graphic (above)
• Please tell friends, family, colleagues, groups and organisations about the Where We Stand statement

You can follow the case’s progress on Thursday and Friday via the Police Spies Out of Lives Twitter.