Journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey have arrived at court in London for a hearing of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal into allegations state authorities were involved in unlawful covert surveillance of their work.
“We’re here simply to seek the truth,” Mr Birney told reporters outside the Royal Courts of Justice.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) is holding hearings into the claims surrounding Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey on Wednesday and Thursday at London’s Royal Courts of Justice.
The journalists were falsely arrested in 2018 during an investigation by Durham Constabulary, supported by the PSNI, after a draft copy of a Police Ombudsman’s report into the 1994 Loughinisland UVF massacre was shown in their 2018 documentary No Stone Unturned.
It emerged the PSNI secretly accessed Mr McCaffrey’s phone records in 2013 following an inquiry to the force’s press office.
Mr Birney said: “We’re here to find out exactly what was going on in the years leading up to our arrest in 2018. We don’t know what we’re going to hear this morning. We don’t know how this is going to go.
“We don’t know if the PSNI and Durham (Constabulary) are going to come clean and tell us what actions they were taking against journalists in Belfast over the last 10 years.”
Mr McCaffrey added: “We feel that we need to know, and journalists and society need to know, if police have been surveilling journalists for no other reason than we’re doing our job.
“Journalism isn’t a crime. Journalists shouldn’t be treated as criminals or as criminal suspects, and if that is the case, UK police have an awful lot to answer for.
“And we need answers today. We need the courts and the police to tell us exactly what they’ve done. Society needs to know that journalists aren’t being targeted by police.”
There has been a call to ensure tribunal hearings looking into claims the phones of two Belfast journalists were secretly monitored by UK authorities are not held behind closed doors.
The respondents in the tribunal are the chief constables of the PSNI and Durham Constabulary, the Security Service, the Northern Ireland Secretary, and the UK home secretary and foreign secretary.
Mr McCaffrey, a former Irish News reporter, said this week’s hearings by the IPT, which investigates claims of unlawful covert action by UK authorities, “should be of concern to all journalists”.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has said it understands that not all hearings this week will be held in open court, and warned that any sessions held behind closed doors “runs counter to the open justice principle and the need for transparency”.
NUJ assistant general secretary Séamus Dooley said: “This case is of fundamental importance and is of concern to journalists globally. The principle that justice should be administered in public is sacred and never more important than in these landmark hearings. The facts which will be revealed are of immense importance and we stand with our member Barry McCaffrey and with Trevor Birney at this time.”
A spokesperson for the Investigatory Powers Tribunal said the hearing will be heard in open at the court, but added: “In accordance with the rules governing the procedure of the Tribunal, there may be points during the hearing where the Tribunal has to sit in closed session.”
