I missed that. My take would be that they’ve made two pointless and illegitimate MLAT requests in the McIntyre non-investigation.

My post on the issue quotes Ed Moloney as saying that the Irish authorities were acting pursuant to an MLAT request.

Unclear. My understanding is that the police on both sides of the open border in Ireland routinely cooperate in a relatively casual way. I suspect they just made a phone call, rather than going through central authorities in the formal MLAT process. Perhaps GHarris can give us the insider’s account.

The police in the south in response to an MLAT request from the UK, right?

“They” didn’t — the police in the South did, briefly. No one tried to question any of the interviewees about Jean McConville, and no one tried to question Winston Rea before his subpoena.

Well, yes, they tried to speak to McIntyre and he refused, so they have taken the next step.

This isn’t what the British law governing recourse to MLAT requests says. Section 7(5) of the Crime International Cooperation Act of 2003 sets these requirements:

“s.7(5) In relation to England and Wales or Northern Ireland, a designated prosecuting authority may itself request assistance under this section if –
(a) It appears to the authority that an offence has been committed or that there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that an offence has been committed, and
(b) The authority has instituted proceedings in respect of the offence in question or it is being investigated.”

An MLAT request must involve a real criminal investigation that is expected to lead to criminal proceedings. This vague, emotions-centered argument that it’s all a meaningless gesture but the police have to do it anyway — this is not the law, and not the function of legal systems.

First, do you have any evidence that the police even tried to speak to any of the BC interviewees before they resorted to an international legal effort to seize academic research material?

Second, if your premise here is correct, no police detective could ever solve any crime until a university did a research project on it. As I say again and again and again, supporters of this effort argue that the only way the police could ever hope to solve a crime is if some professors tell them the answer.