Patrick Corrigan

Head of Nations & Regions @AmnestyUK. Programme Director @AmnestyNI. Board member @BillofRightsNI. Integrated school governor. Tweets in a personal capacity.

[BBC Spotlight NI @BBCSpotlightNI]

Murder in Belfast: Sisters Seeking Justice -
a new series about the killing of Robert McCartney starting tonight at 22.30 on BBC One NI.

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

Jeffrey Donaldson was twice UK delegate to children’s rights group

An investigation published by The Sunday Times reveals that Donaldson repeatedly sought out positions involving child protection throughout his political career at Westminster.
https://t.co/kMtjBr1aDv

[BBC News NI @BBCNewsNI]

No one has ever been held to account for Robert McCartney's murder, but a new documentary shows that his sisters are still campaigning for justice 21 years later.
https://t.co/JUgc6EvatV

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

Welcome news as Police Scotland confirm they are investigating allegations that a Scottish man linked to far-right group Turning Point UK offered to arrange contract killings through paramilitary contacts.

Now we need @metpoliceuk to investigate role of Turning Point UK leaders.

[The National @ScotNational]

EXCLUSIVE: Police Scotland have confirmed they are investigating allegations that a Scottish man linked to Turning Point UK offered to arrange contract killings through paramilitary contacts

An investigation by Al Jazeera was launched five years ago when their undercover reporter joined TPUK, an independent offshoot of the right-wing US group

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

Bar Council of NI condemns David Davis MP remarks:
"The legal profession in Northern Ireland knows the cost of that misrepresentation better than anywhere. Lawyers in this jurisdiction have been murdered for doing their jobs."

[Bar of NI @TheBarofNI]

Denise Kiley KC, Chair of the Bar Council has condemned remarks made by David Davis MP during the House of Commons debate on the Legacy Bill.

You can read the statement in full from the Bar Council via the link below to the Bar of NI website:

https://t.co/eAEq6BcxT4

@FacultyScot @thebarcouncil @TheBarofIreland

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

@AJ_Investigates Full programme now available online: https://t.co/MVK94OD9H7

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

To anyone who has been paying attention, this is not surprising news. Credit to @AJ_Investigates for this exposé.

I trust that @PoliceServiceNI @PoliceScotland and the @metpoliceuk will be paying close attention to the full broadcast.

[Al Jazeera Investigates @AJ_Investigates]

Coming soon: Al Jazeera uncovers disturbing links between British right wing activists, the far right and loyalist paramilitaries.

#Glasgow #Belfast #London

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

Deeply disturbing investigation by @AJ_Investigates exposing the secret network of far-right activists and groups behind violent anti-migrant protests.
https://t.co/2A6Xu1jb8e

[Al Jazeera Investigates @AJ_Investigates]

"They can start cutting people's faces up. They can stab someone. They can shoot someone."

EXCLUSIVE: Our hidden cameras capture the leader of Turning Point UK organising a fake rally for a foreign government and helping arrange a murder-for-hire with loyalist paramilitaries.

[Bar of NI @TheBarofNI]

The Bar of Northern Ireland has joined with other organisations from across the international legal community to strongly condemn sanctions imposed by the US administration against the International Criminal Court (ICC) in a joint statement published recently.

The ICC is an independent court established to investigate and prosecute the most serious international crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The joint statement has called for the sanctions to be withdrawn.

⚫ Read the joint statement in full via our website on the link below ⚫

https://t.co/lW5XSes40J

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

The authorities must not allow paramilitaries or racist hate mobs to determine who can or cannot live in certain areas. There can be no ‘no-go’ areas in Northern Ireland.

One in six areas in Northern Ireland labelled unsafe for asylum seekers - The Detail https://t.co/BCXKikgXWS

[Sam McBride @SJAMcBride]

Jeffrey Donaldson was a key and ‘very keen’ British asset in sensitive west African conflict, paid thousands while Irish Sea border was emerging. Documents show prized role working with Cameroonian dictator’s forces, luxury hotel stays, and personal cash.
https://t.co/WZ4O9datv0

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

In Ballymena for the ‘Ballymena Recovering’ report launch, following the racist violence which forced so many families out of the town in 2025 and left others with long-lasting trauma.

It is clear there’s a long way to go but important to take the first steps.

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

Just out of Faith Healer by Brian Friel at @LyricBelfast.

An acting tour de force from Conleth Hill, Lisa Dwyer Hogg and Chris McCurry, and another triumph for The Lyric in its 75th year.

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

If a great Irish writer’s books can no longer be published in the UK because she stands with Palestine, the question isn’t what law might Sally Rooney have broken, it’s what sort of country has Britain become. https://t.co/WMiKR25F0Y

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

Journalists subject to unlawful surveillance seek legal costs after ‘unreasonable conduct’ by PSNI

Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney are seeking compensation for wasted costs after PSNI failed to properly disclose evidence at the IPT. https://t.co/185uJp2n5U via @computerweekly

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

A very enjoyable read.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

Sorry to hear of the death of Conor Bradford, a very fine journalist and a man of great warmth and character.

Here's Conor for Scene Around Six in 1983, early in his BBC career, picking a St Valentine's Day card and flowers amidst Belfast shoppers. https://t.co/HfrD6S86Q6

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

UK special forces could face prosecution as Afghanistan evidence referred to police - @HannahOGrady @BBCNews

@BBCPanorama had previously investigated allegations the SAS executed handcuffed civilians and children. https://t.co/ISCPpOPVKX

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

Important statement from the Bar of NI, warning that 'members of the legal profession must always be permitted to perform their professional duties, in facilitating fair and equal access to justice for all, without fear or favour and also without threat or intimidation.'

[Bar of NI @TheBarofNI]

In light of commentary regarding high profile cases before the courts in recent weeks, the Bar Council has reaffirmed its commitment to the cab rank rule and the essential role performed by the independent referral Bar in delivering access to justice for all:

You can read the statement in full from the Bar Council via the link below to the Bar of NI website:

https://t.co/9MSQwKT5FH

[Patrick Corrigan @PatrickCorrigan]

The Fight to be Heard - new documentary by @AmnestyUK.

At a time when it’s never been more vital for us to come together, this film is a rallying cry to make sure we continue to have our voices heard.
https://t.co/6gkqESTfjT