Professor Kieran McEvoy:

Four cases collapsed for legal reasons. In one case, the defendant died. Another case is currently before the courts. There is a legal challenge to one of the cases that collapsed, which is ongoing. Again, I cannot speak on that.

The second element to it all is that the investigations being carried out by different policing mechanisms were biased and again, were state-centred and focused on state actors. One element of that narrative basically was that there was a disproportionate number of state-actor cases being focused on by the Historical Enquiries Team and, when that was disbanded, by the legacy investigative branch of the PSNI. The state is directly involved in this regard. Leaving aside the issue of collusion, which is a significant issue, the state is directly involved in approximately 10% of the overall fatalities in the conflict. In some elements of this narrative, it was asked why there are so many cases when they are such a small percentage? The key issue that bulks up the number of cases being investigated initially by the Historical Enquiries Team and then by the legacy investigative branch is an acknowledgement that, particularly between 1970 and 1973, the Royal Military Police was carrying out the investigations. Those investigations do not stand up as proper investigations. In effect, they were operational reviews as to what happened. Witnesses often were not questioned and people were not interviewed under caution. The lack of legal rigour in some of those cases is why prosecutorial cases have fallen apart. A very critical review was carried out by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary on the work of the Historical Enquiries Team and the way it went about investigating those state-actor cases in 2011 and 2012. Basically, the Chief Constable accepted that all of those needed to be done. That was 238 cases. I can send the information on to the Deputy.