The family of murdered Belfast solicitor and human rights lawyer Pat Finucane have called for the inquiry to be established into his 1989 killing to be “fully independent, wide-ranging and publicly transparent”.
All four surviving members of the family of Mr Finucane, who was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries, testified before Congress in Washington, DC on Tuesday on his killing.
Their appearance on Capitol Hill came just over two months after the UK Labour government ordered an independent public inquiry into the murder of the 39-year-old solicitor, who was shot at his home in Belfast by loyalists in front of his wife and children while eating dinner with his family at their home on February 12th, 1989.
Mr Finucane’s widow, Geraldine, was injured in the attack.
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On Tuesday, she and their children Catherine, a psychological councillor and youth worker who practises in Belfast; Michael, who has a law practice in Dublin; and John, MP for North Belfast and who has a law practice in the city, all spoke before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on the forthcoming public inquiry into the murder of Mr Finucane, which was announced by UK secretary of state Hilary Benn in September.
The family emphasised, through their testimony, the absolute necessity of an inquiry that would be conducted in a manner Michael Finucane described as “fully independent, wide-ranging and publicly transparent”.
“Many people have described the murder of my father as the worst example of British state collusion in the history of the Northern Ireland conflict.
“Such a case requires nothing less than the most fulsome and effective of inquiries possible, in order to address the deep public concerns about all of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Pat Finucane,” he told The Irish Times on Tuesday.
Specifically, the family believes the inquiry should facilitate a panel of judges with appropriate experience in human rights law and that the terms of reference should be of sufficiently wide scope to encompass the issues relevant to the murder of their father and on the policy of collusion with loyalist paramilitaries.
All four testimonies were concise and at times harrowing. Mr Finucane’s widow told the commission that her family members never believed that “Pat’s murder was simply the work of gunmen who killed him. It was and is clear that there were many other participants who helped to carry out and implement the scheme.
“Loyalist paramilitaries were not capable of devising and realising a plan to murder such a high-profile target without significant help. The information that has come to light ... clearly demonstrates that they had such help, and that it came from British state sources, such as army intelligence, the Security Service [MI5] and the RUC special branch.”
Katherine Finucane told the gathering it “wasn’t just my brothers and me who had their father stolen from them, but our children too. So, I like to tell my daughter what her Granda was like – he liked to play football and didn’t like to lose, he liked a joke and a laugh and he often played practical jokes on his siblings.”
The family thanked Congress for the many years of support, including from members who have themselves died in the decades since Pat Finucane was murdered. Introducing the family, Representative Chris Smith, the co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, told his colleagues that the murder of Mr Finucane was “one of the worst instances of collusion, which by all accounts was obvious, shocking in its direct aggressiveness, and went right up to the upper levels of British government.”
Mr Smith said this was the 11th congressional hearing he had chaired in which a Finucane family member had testified. He was one of 25 members of Congress who in 2020 cosigned a letter to then British prime minister Boris Johnson urging the establishment of an official inquiry.
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