ZERO TOLERANCE FOR COERCIVE LAWS

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties strongly opposes new proposals to
curtail the right to silence and allow suspects to be held for up to four
days for questioning.

Justice Minister John O'Donoghue's proposals to allow courts to draw
inferences of guilt from a suspect's failure to answer questions and to
allow for extended periods of detention are unnecessary, unfair and unwise.

The proposed measures are unnecessary because the crime rate is falling
steadily and there is no evidence that the lack of such powers is allowing
criminals to go free. In fact, there has been no research on the effect of
similar powers introduced under the 1996 Drug Trafficking Act.

The proposed measures would be unfair because we already have cases of
people confessing to things they did not do, such as Dean Lyons who recently
admitted to murdering a psychiatric patient at Grangegorman, only to have
the charges dropped when another man admitted the murder.

If detention periods are extended and detainees put under more pressure to
make statements or answer questions there would be more false confessions
and more miscarriages of justice.

The proposals would be unwise because they would represent a fundamental
shift from the position where a person is assumed to be innocent until
proven guilty to one where a person is assumed to be guilty until they prove
themselves innocent. That would break the bond between the police and the
people on which our justice system relies.

Trust in the GardaED and the law enforcement systems, already frayed, would
be replaced by fear, with disastrous long-term consequences. The Minister
for Justice would be better occupied implementing the eight years old
recommendations of the Martin Committee that all Garda questioning should be
video recorded, instead of dreaming up more coercive measures to shore up
his discredited zero tolerance policy.

Judy Walsh, Executive Secretary, Shivaun Quinlivan, Administrative
Assistant, Irish Council for Civil Liberties, 14, Exchequer Street, Dublin
2.

Checked-by: Rolf Ernst