The Policing You Don’t See
CAJ | November 201209 November 2012
09 November 2012
Covert Policing and the accountability gap: Five years on from the transfer of ‘national security’ primacy to MI5 The programme of police reform ushered in by the peace settlement placed great emphasis on accountability and transparency.
As this report details, the Patten Report explicitly recommended that these principles should apply to covert policing. Despite this the British Government, in a paper appended to the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, set out “future national security arrangements in Northern Ireland” which shifted the most sensitive areas of covert policing in the opposite direction, effectively ring fencing them outside the post-Patten accountability arrangements