British Court Sets New Deadline for Investigation into 1989 Murder of Human Rights Lawyer Pat Finucane

There has been a new twist in the 35-year failure of the British government to properly investigate the 1989 murder of Belfast human rights lawyer Pat Finucane.

Last week the Court of Appeal in Belfast ruled that the British government had three weeks to agree on an appropriate investigation (appropriate as in compliant with the Article 2 standards of the European Convention on Human Rights), which also has to be agreed to by the Finucane family.

If it doesn’t, Lord Justice Horner from the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal said there would be three more weeks for the family and the government to submit their own proposals. If the court isn’t happy with either of those, it will impose its own Article 2 compliant process.

The judge said, “This was a deliberately cruel and vicious murder designed to cause maximum hurt and upset to the family and friends of Mr Finucane.”

The ruling is a major development in the family’s frustrating, decades-long search for the truth.

Finucane was shot dead in his home by members of the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA) on 12 February 1989. He was having dinner with his wife and three young children when the attack happened. He died at the scene, and his wife Geraldine was also injured in the attack.

The UDA stated that Pat Finucane had been a member of the IRA, but this claim was denied by family and friends, as well as by official police statements; there has never been any evidence presented to substantiate this claim.

The intelligence that led to Finucane’s murder was coordinated by Brian Nelson, a UDA member and British Army agent. Nelson is now deceased and was never convicted of any offense in connection with the murder.

In 1989, I was a journalist in my 20s and reported on the attack when it happened. I have documented the case and campaigned with his family ever since.

Human Rights First has been campaigning on the case too from those early years when it was known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

I represented Human Rights First on a panel of international experts investigating impunity during the conflict. We reported our findings in April 2024, and the murder was a key example illustrating British state collusion.

Thanks to the tenacity of the family, it has been a case that won’t go away, and has come to illustrate Britain’s record of collusion with paramilitary murderers and impunity for killings during the conflict.

In 2012, then-British Prime Minister David Cameron publicly apologized to the family for state collusion in the murder but failed to order a full independent public inquiry.

In 2019, the UK Supreme Court declared that previous investigations into the killing failed to meet the standards required by Article 2 of the ECHR. Geraldine Finucane has since brought a series of legal challenges over the government’s response to the findings, prompting the latest welcome ruling.

Geraldine and other members of the Finucane family have repeatedly testified in the U.S. Congress about the murder and in 2020, dozens of members of Congress called on the British government to order an independent inquiry into the killing, noting that “U.S. legislation urging your government to recognize the overwhelming public interest in a ‘true’, independent, judicial inquiry has been enacted and/or passed the House of Representatives on four separate occasions.”

Human Rights First urges the new British Labour government to immediately announce an Article 2-compliant process for the case. We have been supporting the family’s campaign for three decades and will continue until they finally get the inquiry they deserve.