Social justice campaigner Helen Steel who was deceived into a two-year relationship by police spy John Dines, solicitors Imran Khan and Gareth Peirce, Green peer Jenny Jones and Paddy Hill, who was wrongly convicted in the Birmingham Six miscarriage of justice, are also due to speak at the conference.
Details of the conference – which is entitled “Subversion, sabotage and spying – political policing and state racism in the UK” – can be found here.
The line-up of speakers – which can be found here – also includes Janet Alder whose brother was unlawfully killed at a police station, Deborah Coles from Inquest, Dave Smith from the Blacklist Support Group, and Stafford Scott of theTottenham Rights group.
A key issue facing the public inquiry into undercover policing at the moment is how much of it will be held in private. The police want large portions of it to be held in secret – a move opposed by those who were spied on (see this for background).
Lord Justice Pitchford, who is heading the inquiry, is due to publish a ruling on this issue on May 3.
His inquiry was set up after it was revealed that a Metropolitan police undercover unit – known as the Special Demonstration Squad – had gathered information on the Stephen Lawrence family (see this and this for background).
Some of this information was collected by an undercover officer, who has not been named and is known only as N81.
N81 infiltrated an anti-racist group known as the Movement for Justice, according to a senior Metropolitan police source who has been involved in the management of covert operations. The Movement for Justice supported the campaign by the Lawrence family to compel the police to investigate properly the racist murder of their son.
N81 worked undercover pretending to be a political activist between 1996 and 2001, according to this official report. A profile of N81’s work written by theUndercover Research Group can be found here.
Next month’s conference at London South Bank University is organised by The Monitoring Group and the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.
Disclosure : I have also been invited to speak at the conference about the covert infiltration of political movements since 1968.
