Geoff Knupfer

So there are four cases still outstanding.

Just to qualify, the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, was used as the cut-off date.

So there have been cases of people being abducted and disappeared since one or two, and they are not included in that list.

And the other important aspect of this is that this is about paramilitary activity.

So where you've got criminal disappearances, they wouldn't necessarily fall within the auspices of the commission's cases.

The commission was designed... I mean, I've got to say that the legislation that the two governments passed, two governments enacted, is absolutely inspired because this is wholly and solely humanitarian.

It's about helping the families.

It's about recovering...

the victims and returning them to the families, really no questions asked.

So this is not a criminal process, it's a humanitarian process.

And any information that the commission comes by, by whatever means,

privileged it can't be passed to the police it can't be passed to anybody else and it can't be used in a criminal prosecution yeah I think you know some people say well that's an amnesty well perhaps not it's a limited immunity more than an amnesty I think amnesty is a politically loaded word so I think immunity is fine it is limited

And if the police do something separate from the commission, there's nothing stopping them investigating this as a murder case.

It's just that the commission can't pass information to them.

And we can't hold evidence.

So I think it comes as quite a shock to some people to say, well, you know, what would the commission do if it came across evidence?

We would conceal it.

We wouldn't disclose it to anybody.

In fact, we'd destroy it.

Yeah, I think, bless them, that the people who framed this legislation did so from, if they'll forgive me for this, from a rather naive standpoint.