LORD HUTTON is often described as an 'old school", establishment judge. That is to gravely underestimate the position. He spent two decades before becoming a law lord working full time and overtime to whitewash the worst extremities of British injustice. First in the 1970s, he spent the best part of a decade employed as a lawyer by the Northern Ireland Office. His job centrally included preparing British imperialism's legal defence in a whole string of scandals - internment, torture, 'shoot to kill', Bloody Sunday - not just in the North of Ireland, but in the European Court of Human Rights. He knows all about whitewashes, because the original Bloody Sunday inquiry (The Widgery Inquiry) is now universally accepted as such: but he spent many years peddling it. He is steeped in its traditions and its methods. He therefore needed no nods and winks to know what to do. He was then appointed as a judge (an unusual route, as most judges are not recruited in this way from the ranks of "employed" lawyers, who do not practice in the courts and do not have experience of working for a variety of clients). He then spent 10 years as judge and a Northern Ireland Appeal Court judge presiding over the no-jury Diplock Courts, and finding people notorious interrogation centres others. guilty, often on the basis of confession evidence extracted In case after case, judges like Hutton accepted without question the evidence of police, army and government offi cials against the obvious facts - let alone the testimony of There was never any chance of him doing anything else b the bidding of the security/military establishment and its political overseers in the Kelly case. This is shown in his criticism of Kelly for breaking the rules of confidentiality, when clearly such rules are universally accepted as meaningless in situations where someone in h
position is faced with governmenta malpractice. The problem for the government is that Hutton has gone too far: Blair would have been better served by being slapped on the wrist lightly, so that the report could be defended as impartial al independent. The fact is that in its present fo the Hutton report will not allow ar of the type of "closure" that Bla and his allies are looking for, because it has been met with universal disbelief.
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EUROPEAN