Hallett Review

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. I am very keen to ensure that all hon. Members get to participate in this statement. I appreciate that the Secretary of State is giving very full answers. May I gently suggest slightly clipped and crisp questions, and crisp answers, as we do have quite a lot of business that we need to move on to?

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Does the Secretary of State recognise that although Lady Justice Hallett makes it clear at the start of her report that it is not a whitewash, it does leave a couple of black boxes in respect of Operation Rapid, not least the fact that there is little explanation as to why during that period so many cases on the list went from being “wanted” to being “not wanted”? Lady Justice Hallett gave an assurance that there was no chilling effect, but why then the frozen response on the part of the PSNI whenever it clearly realised that mistakes were made in respect to the Downey letter and why the frozen response whenever the Historical Enquiries Team indicated that it had identified possible evidence in relation to Mr Downey and offences in Northern Ireland?

[Mrs Villiers]

The hon. Gentleman rightly says that there is further work to be done—there is no doubt about that. One important aspect of that work is the police investigation of all of these cases to check whether the “not wanted” judgment was the correct one. The reason Lady Justice Hallett has selected 36 cases as a priority for that investigation is that she believes the police might have been applying the wrong threshold to decide whether an individual was wanted or not wanted. Clearly, therefore, it will be very important to look carefully at those cases, and I am sure the PSNI will do so.