Former Spy Martin McGartland.
A lawsuit against Britain’s Security Service (MI5) by a former spy, who in the 1980s infiltrated the Provisional Irish Republican Army, commonly known as IRA, is to be judged in secret, a court in London has decided. The spy, Martin McGartland, of Belfast, Northern Ireland, was recruited by the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the mid-1980s. The information he supplied to the security agencies over several years is widely credited with having saved the lives of at least 50 British police officers and soldiers. His autobiographical experiences formed the basis of the 2008 motion picture 50 Dead Men Walking.
However, McGartland’s cover was
dramatically blown in 1991, when the IRA began suspecting that he might
be an MI5 mole. After several hours of interrogation by the IRA’s
Internal Security Unit, McGartland managed to escape his captors by
throwing himself out of a third-floor window. He survived serious
injuries and was taken into hiding by MI5, living in a series of safe
houses across Britain for nearly a decade. In 1999 the IRA caught up
with him at an MI5 safe house in North Tyneside, in the northeast of
England, where he was shot and left for dead by an IRA hit team while
walking to his car.
McGartland is now suing MI5 and its
institutional patron, the British Home Office, claiming that they failed
to support him after he was shot by the IRA. In his lawsuit, McGartland
claims that the government funding he was receiving for treatment for
post-traumatic stress disorder was withdrawn after he publicly
criticized the British government’s counterterrorism policies. In May of
2013, it emerged
that Home Office solicitors had filed a formal request to hold the
trial as a Closed Material Procedure (CMP) hearing. This type of
practice, which became law in Britain under the 2013 Justice and
Security Act, allows the court to decide a case without giving the
plaintiff party any details of the information against them.
In many cases, the government resorts to
CMP ostensibly to protect ‘sources and methods’. But McGartland’s legal
team said that the secret hearing was designed “solely to cover up
[MI5’s] own embarrassment and wrongdoing and not, as the Government has
been claiming, to protect national security”. Moreover, civil rights
groups warned that applying CMP to McGartland’s lawsuit would open the
way for the imposition of wider restrictions on the principle of open
justice and would normalize secret hearings in the civil courts.
After the judge hearing the case decided
to impose CMP on the proceedings, McGartland’s legal team filed an
appeal. Now the appeal judges seem to have sided with the Home Office.
In a decision published
on Tuesday, the judges opined that the imposition of CMP was “a case
management decision properly open to the judge and there is no proper
basis for this court to interfere with it”. They added that their
decision did not represent a blanket approval of secret legal
proceedings, but that they expected court judges to scrutinize future
CMP applications “with care”.
The ruling means that McGartland’s legal
team will not be allowed to hear testimony by certain MI5 witnesses or
view court material designated as “sensitive” by the government. Lawyers
for the former IRA informant said on Tuesday that the approval of the
imposition of CMP represented “a serious aberration from the tradition
of open justice”. But lawyers for the Home Office said that the ability
to protect sensitive information was central to the proper function of a
national security service.
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