Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Since we last debated this in 2022, the long awaited review of the Offences against the State Act has been published. This was the fig leaf that Sinn Féin used to justify abstaining on the vote to renew the Special Criminal Court as opposed to its traditional correct position of opposing the court and that most of the rest of the Opposition and the Government cited when voting for it.

The review has recommended that the Act should be repealed. With that, the court would be abolished, yet here we are again with another motion to renew it for another year that will be nodded along by the Government. Most of the Opposition will go along with it and some may abstain.

Unfortunately, the majority opinion of the review is to turn what was sold to the public 50 years ago as an emergency court to combat the IRA into a permanent institution of injustice. It seems all the majority really had a problem with was the ad hocway a supposedly emergency anti-terrorist non-jury court "mission crept" into adjudicating on more and more cases. Its solution is, therefore, to legitimise the abolition of the fundamental human right to trial by a jury of one's peers by making it official and permanent and to add a few minor safeguards as window dressing to take the blatantly unjust look off it. The justification most commonly given is the need to protect juries from intimidation. In this day and age of video evidence and remote technology, however, there are many ways that juries can be anonymised and protected from identification, short of abolishing them. This court is not necessary anymore and, in truth, never really was.

The majority report recommends maintaining the claimed "belief" evidence of a garda that someone was a member of a terrorist organisation or criminal gang as evidence that he or she is a member. Anyone involved in criminal law will tell you that gardaí lie in court. They do so regularly, but at least those lies are open to challenge in a jury court. Contradictory evidence, such as the video evidence that vindicated the defendants in the Jobstown trial and exposed the Garda's co-ordinated lies, can be introduced to a fair-minded jury of ordinary people rather than a hand-picked trio of upper class establishment judges.

It is not only us saying that the majority report on the review is wrong. A host of human rights and civil liberties organisations in Ireland and internationally are demanding that the Special Criminal Court be abolished and not replaced by any new non-jury court. These include the ICCL, Amnesty International, the State’s own Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism.

There was also a minority report within the review. It eviscerated the threadbare arguments of the majority. The two members in question wrote: "We do not believe that the recommendations contained in the Majority Report are supported by adequate empirical evidence or sufficiently extensive comparative analysis". In order words, the majority came to the conclusion which the Government and the establishment wanted, regardless of the evidence.

It is important to ask why the State wants this power. It is because it wants to ensure that, if there are threats to the political and economic status quonow or in the future, it has a ready-made Diplock court on hand to lock people up on the say-so of a garda. This is not about combating organised crime or terrorism. It never was. It is about maximising the repressive powers of the State and its ability to jail potential opponents that might threaten the status quo.

No one who supports freedom of organisation, freedom of expression or any of the basic principles of democracy should vote in favour of this motion or in favour of creating a new permanent, non-jury court. If the Government will not do the right thing and simply abolish the Special Criminal Court, it should allow the people to decide and hold a referendum on whether a permanent non-jury court should be established. I am confident that the answer it will get will be a resounding "No".

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