The UK government has won a supreme court appeal to block the release of sensitive information to a Troubles-era inquest on the grounds of national security.
In a judgment which will have implications for other legacy investigations in Northern Ireland, including the identification of the IRA informer known as Stakeknife, the UK’s highest court unanimously allowed the appeal by the Northern Secretary, Hilary Benn, to prevent a coroner from disclosing summaries of evidence contained in secret security force files.
Human rights groups reacted with concern to Wednesday’s ruling, which Daniel Holder, director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, said “could enable a Secretary of State to conceal the involvement of state agents in killings and other violations during the Northern Ireland conflict.
“The ruling itself implies that doing so is an appropriate application of the [UK] government’s Neither Confirm Nor Deny [NCND] policy,” he said.
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Grainne Teggart, the Northern Ireland deputy director of Amnesty International UK, said it was a “grim day for truth” and NCND was “policy, not law. The [UK] government’s misuse of this policy continues to block truth, rather than deliver it.”
In a written statement to parliament, Mr Benn welcomed the judgment, describing it as “a highly complex case with wide-ranging implications.
“The government will therefore take time to fully consider all aspects of this judgment, including those relevant to the request made by Operation Kenova for the government to name Stakeknife [sic],” he said, adding that he would “return to the House on this as soon as the government has come to a final view.”
The final report of Operation Kenova, which investigated the activities of Stakeknife, the British army’s most senior double agent during the Troubles, called for him to be officially identified, arguing that the circumstances are “exceptional”.
Widely understood to be the senior Belfast IRA member Freddie Scappaticci, Stakeknife was not named in the report due to a UK government policy of “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) relating to sensitive intelligence issues.
Wednesday’s ruling was on a challenge by the Northern Secretary to the decision by coroner Louisa Fee to disclose “gists” of this evidence in her inquest findings into the death of 25-year-old Liam Paul “Topper” Thompson, who was shot dead by the UDA while in a taxi in Springfield Park in Belfast in 1994.
His family has always believed state collusion was involved.
Delivering the judgment, Lord Stephens outlined that one of the issues for consideration at Mr Thompson’s inquest was “whether the security forces had received information from an informer, or whether there was other sensitive and secret information in connection with the deceased’s death.
“The Police Service of Northern Ireland, the PSNI, held documents which were relevant or potentially relevant to one or other of those questions.
“However, the Secretary of State considered that disclosing those documents would be contrary to the public interest in protecting national security, in particular, because it would be contrary to the policy of neither confirming nor denying (NCND) the use of informers or other secret sources of information,” Lord Stephens said.
The Northern Secretary sought to withhold the information on Public Interest Immunity (PII) grounds, which was supported by the PSNI Chief Constable.
The coroner decided to uphold the PII claim in relation to a series of documents, known as folders one to seven, but decided a gist of the information in folder seven should be disclosed and admitted as evidence in the inquest.
This was initially challenged by the Northern Secretary and the PSNI chief constable in the High Court, but the chief constable subsequently accepted her decision that a revised gist of folder seven should be disclosed.
The coroner’s decision was upheld by the UK high court and the court of appeal, but supreme court judges unanimously found neither gist should be disclosed and she had made a number of “errors” in her decision to do so.
Lord Stephens said the court accepted the Northern Secretary’s “assessment as to the existence and extent of the risks to national security” and concluded that “the balance of the public interest clearly lies against the disclosure of the gist.”
The Coroner, the PSNI chief constable Jon Boutcher, and Mr Thompson’s brother Eugene, who died earlier this year, were respondents in the supreme court challenge taken by the Northern Secretary and advocated the release of the gist, as did the interveners in the case, the Northern Ireland Commission for Human Rights.
Eugene Thompson, who had long campaigned on behalf of his brother, was terminally ill at the time of the supreme court hearing in June, and died in July, a few days after the chief constable hand-delivered a letter of apology to him at his hospital bed, apologising for police failures and saying his murder may have been preventable.
In a statement, the chief constable said the PSNI would “take time to study today’s judgment in detail and will carefully consider its implications” and would discuss it with the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) and other stakeholders in the new year.
“As referred to in the judgment, the PSNI has taken steps to reform its approach to such [PII] claims and we published new in-house guidance on December 12th 2025,” he said.
“We need a PII process that works to the satisfaction of the courts and our partners, and has regard to the proper disclosure of information to victims and their families.”
The CEO of Relatives for Justice, Mark Thompson, said the case had demonstrated “beyond doubt that Paul’s murder involved state agent/s at some level” and for his family “today’s ruling has reinforced the view that those running agents and informers remain unaccountable, above and beyond the law.
“This does not bode well for any new legacy arrangements [and] effectively constitutes the retention of a de facto form of immunity that was previously found to be unlawful within the Legacy Act,” he said.
