A leading US-based human rights group has said that demands for a full inquiry into the killing of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane cannot be halted. Mr Finucane was shot dead by the Ulster Defence Association in 1989.
Elisa Massimino, the Washington Director of the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights, said that a public inquiry in this case was inevitable. Ms Massimino said that any credible judicial figure would find it impossible to ignore the evidence.
The Lawyers' Committee's new report, called Beyond Collusion, details all the relevant information surrounding the case. Backed by twelve international groups, including Amnesty International, the British-Irish Rights Watch and the Committee on the Administration of Justice, it claims to provide vital new information.
The report includes allegations that RUC interrogation notes confirm that a police double agent who was prosecuted for Mr Finucane's murder in 1989 made significant admissions about his involvement back in 1990.
The document also claims that a former member of a covert army unit said that security forces knew the UDA was targeting Mr Finucane but never warned the lawyer.
The trial of ex-UDA quartermaster William Stobie on charges connected to the murder collapsed in Belfast last December after the prosecution's only witness was deemed unable to give evidence. Mr Stobie was murdered by former UDA comrades outside his North Belfast home just days later.
Ms Massimino warned that the British government now needed urgently to launch a public inquiry, given this degradation of evidence.
Ms Massimino was joined by Mr Finucane's widow, Geraldine, as she published a detailed account of the allegations of security force involvement in the murder.
"It's such a huge case, it took ten years for me to realise that Pat's murder wasn't just about the murder of one man," said Geraldine Finucane.
"It's about a strategy and a policy being employed by the British Government for the whole of Northern Ireland. A lot of people just go about their daily business and don't realise what has been going on beneath the surface," she added.
Three years ago, Mrs Finucane presented a document prepared by another human rights body to Tony Blair. She says that she has had no communication with Downing Street since then.
At the all-party talks at Weston Park in Staffordshire last July, the British and Irish governments agreed to appoint an international judge to examine six cases, including the Finucane murder, where collusion had been alleged and decide if public inquiries were required.
