GREEN LEFT : Ireland : Martin Corey

Ireland: Political prisoner Martin Corey denied justice

Monday, June 3, 2013

By Barry Kearney

Martin Corey is a 63-year-old man jailed in the six counties of Ireland's north still claimed by Britain. He has been held for three years without trial.

On April 16, 2010, Corey’s house in Lurgan was visited by members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and Corey was arrested.

When he asked what the charges were, Corey was told that the police officers “did not know”. All they were told was to arrest Corey.

Corey is a republican who, in his youth, fought against the foreign occupation of his land. During this struggle, he was charged with the murder of two members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the forerunner of the PSNI. Corey was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in December 1973.

Corey served just short of the next 19 years behind bars; he was released in June 1992. He did not sign any documents imposing conditions on his release.

Corey returned to Lurgan, where he set up a successful business as the local grave digger, formed a long-term relationship and settled down to a peaceful life.

That was, until his arrest three years ago.

Corey is still in jail and he still does not know what the charges against him are. Corey’s legal team also do not know what the charges are and nor does any judge hearing the case against him.

This is because, according to the British Northern Ireland Office (NIO), he is being held on “Undisclosed or Secret Charges”. A special advocate appointed by the NIO can view the evidence and tell the judge what they can do.

This makes a mockery of the judicial system when a politician, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland who is unelected by people in Ireland's north, can determine a person's freedom. Corey is selectively interned by an unjust British system.

As a prisoner with a life sentence, Corey is entitled to a parole hearing every 12 months. However, since he was arrested in 2010, this has been continually adjourned or not even scheduled.

The conditions Corey is being kept under are a disgrace. Mail has been kept from him for weeks at a time, craft that he has made has been smashed by vindictive prison officers and he has been denied proper medical treatment within a reasonable time.

In May last year, Corey appealed his jailing on the grounds that he had not been charged with any crime nor brought before a judge.

In his verdict on the appeal, Justice Treacy said Corey's human rights had been breached. He ordered Corey to be released immediately and placed no conditions on the release.

Corey returned to Maghaberry Prison to pack his belongings and his family travelled from Lurgan to take him home. While Corey waited in the prison's reception area he was told the then-secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Owen Paterson, had ordered him to be returned to his cell.

The NIO had appealed Treacy’s decision, but only after Treacy had boarded a plane and was about to leave the country. With Treacy out of the way, a patsy of the British NIO upheld its appeal and Corey was sent back behind bars.

When Corey’s legal team found out, they immediately launched legal action against the NIO's appeal, but to no avail. Corey finally got to appeal the decision in the High Court on July 11, more than six weeks after Treacy's original decision.

The NIO's appeal was upheld and Corey's case was set to be reheard on November 26. At the rehearing, a panel of three appeals judges upheld the NIO's decision to keep Corey incarcerated.

Corey’s legal team then applied to the High Court for permission to take their case before the Supreme Court in London.

They were confident of winning in the Supreme Court, but in early May, their euphoria was cut short as the appeal was denied without any valid reason being given.

If you look beyond this denial, you will see British intransigence at its best. Denying Corey the right to appeal to the Supreme Court blocks his application to the European Court of Human Rights, as he has not exhausted all domestic avenues.

British politicians can be quick to point the finger about human rights abuses elsewhere in the world, but are quiet when such are abuses are carried out by their own government.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, signed as part of the peace process to end armed conflict in Ireland's north, came with the promise of equality and justice for all. But 15 years on, Corey is one of those still suffering from a great injustice at the hands of a vindictive British government.

The law of the land must prevail. If the British authorities believe Corey is guilty of a crime, then they must charge him and bring him before a court of law, where he has the right to defend himself. Rather, he has been forced to fight an invisible foe in the guise of undisclosed charges.

The time is well passed when Martin Corey should be freed.

[Barry Kearney is a member of the James Connolly Association Australia, Melbourne.]

From GLW issue 968

Tags:

• Britain
• civil liberties
• democracy
• Ireland
• national liberation

Militarized Olympic Zone Tramples on Civil Liberties

Olympics 2012 Militarized Zone : Lockdown London an Orwellian Parody Police State Developed in British Occupied Ireland

 Olympics: Kabul. Baghdad. London. Three to avoid this summer 

The missile batteries, fighter jets and VIP lanes are what happens when a world agency blackmails a city aching for prestige 

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • guardian.co.uk, 

There seems to be no limit to the efforts of Lord Coe and his friends at the International Olympic Committee to bring this summer's London Games into ridicule and contempt. A week-long "military exercise" is currently under way in the capital. RAF Typhoon jets are to scream back and forth over the Thames. Starstreak surface-to-air missile batteries are being set up in East End parks and on flats in Bow, with 10 soldiers manning each one. Army and navy helicopters will clatter back and forth, with snipers hanging from their doors "to shoot down pilots of terrorist planes".

Machine-guns will for the first time be toted by guards on the London tube. Police special forces, "trained to kill", will wear balaclavas to avoid identification. There are to be naval landing craft roaming the coast off Weymouth and submarines at the ready. The Olympics have become a festival of the global security industry, with a running and jumping contest as a sideshow. No one in government dares call a halt. Nero in his prime could not have squandered so much money on circuses.

The Olympics have become an Orwellian parody of what happens when a world agency blackmails a government aching for prestige into spending without limit. Not one defence spokesman has come up with a plausible scenario for the jets and missiles. The latter have a range of just three miles and are said to be usable "only at the express instruction of the prime minister". What will they shoot down, and on whose head will it crash?

These boys-with-toys are costing taxpayers £1bn yet they cannot add an iota to national security. They have nothing to do with deterringterrorism, even supposing there to be any such threat. The modern terrorist uses suicide tactics, by definition immune to deterrence. All the government has done is raise the politico-military profile of the Games and tempted some crackpot to have a go. Even at the street level, Occupy London and the cycling militants must regard Lord Coe's VIPlanes as a golden opportunity. The Olympic organisers are planning to close the Mall, Horse Guards Parade and most of St James's Park from June onwards, for fear someone might plant a bomb near the volleyball contest, crazily located behind Downing Street as a sop to Tony Blair. This is despite the prime minister and the mayor's office specifically countermanding the decision. Computer firms eager for contracts place regular stories about the "threat to the games from cyber-attack". One firm has been hired to deploy 450 "IT wizards" to guard the Games from hackers.

This means that, for the rest of the summer, London will effectively be "ruled" by the IOC. Enthusiasts for world government should take note. An unaccountable, self-validating body expects five-star hotels, chauffeur-driven BMWs, Soviet-style Zil lanes and all-green light phases for its thousands of "officials" and corporate hangers-on. It not only expects them, it gets them. It demanded and got its own legislative powers, under the 2006 London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act. Lord Coe does what the IOC tells him and passes the bill to George Osborne, who pays it. When the opening ceremony alone was £30m short (on a staggering budget of £60m), the cheque was promptly sent round.

The IOC is ever vigilant for its sponsors. Inspectors are to fan out across the capital, arresting anyone who uses the words "2012 Olympics" or any other associative phrase, for not paying Coe and the IOC a fortune in sponsorship fees. Jamie Oliver cannot hold an Olympics party in Victoria Park as he is a non-sponsor. Blogs, pictures or videos on YouTube or Facebook are banned. Anyone who so much as carries an unapproved bag, hat or shoe in a venue is banned. The Chinese politburo is Liberty Hall compared with this authoritarianism.

Transport for London has been reduced to a gibbering wreck. It has warned Londoners to get out of the city for the duration – at what cost to the economy? Citizens have been warned that central London roads will be closed, tube drivers may go on strike, and hospital casualty departments will be short of blood. How this will make money for London, as promised by Coe and others, is a mystery. As a tourist destination the place is being put on a par with Baghdad or Kabul.

There is no civic dividend from this sum and never has been. August in London is always a light month and, as the empty rows at Athens and Beijing showed, Olympic sports are not people draws. The irony is that the chief success of the London Olympics organisers has been the chief source of criticism. They have undoubtedly generated domestic enthusiasm. By making ticket sales a national lottery they achieved what appears to be the first sold-out Olympics of modern times.

However, roughly 85% of these buyers are Britons, few of whom will stay in London hotels. The crowds will be concentrated at the venues. It is the government, through its hospitality for the IOC "family", that will sustain the luxury hotel market this August. For the non-games districts of the capital, I would be surprised if shops, buses and tubes are not half deserted, taxis unused, theatres, cinemas and concert halls empty and any royal park not fenced off for a commercial sponsor pleasantly uncrowded.

The London Games began in a spirit of economy and popular enthusiasm. At the considerable cost of £2.4bn, they were to answer the state gigantism of the Beijing Games and fuse modern sport into the urban fabric. London would prove that cities did not have to be rich to host the games. It would be "the people's games".

The IOC put a stop to that. It drove a pliant British government to the present paranoia, budgetary incontinence and corporate greed. If the image of the London Games is to be rescued this summer, it must rely on diverting attention to the sincerity of young athletes and spectators, on somehow restoring the dignity of the sporting spirit. For now, a noble movement has been hijacked by a monster that is plainly out of control.