Judge Cory has embarrassed Britain by contacting the families in contentiouskillings, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor.
The British government will seek to brazen out the embarrassment after retired Canadian judge Mr Peter Cory contacting the families of Pat Finucane, Rosemary Nelson, Robert Hamill and Billy Wright to inform them he had urged independent inquiries into their killings.
It must be rather uncomfortable for London that the judge felt compelled to act against its wishes, annoyed at what he viewed as the tardy and inhumane manner in which it dealt with his reports delivered last October.
It contrasts with the manner in which the Irish Government handled the reports.
An inquiry into the 1989 killings of RUC officers Chief Supt Harry Breen and Supt Bob Buchanan is due to begin in the spring after Judge Cory found documents he believed "reveal evidence that, if accepted, could be found to constitute collusion" between gardaí and the killers.
On the killings of Lord Justice Gibson and Lady Gibson in 1987, the judge said he could "come to no other conclusion that there is simply no evidence of collusion on which to base a direction to hold a public inquiry".
The defence from the British government is that its four cases are far more complex, and that publication of the reports could have serious security implications. Such arguments obviously cut little ice with the judge.
Judge Cory is a respected international legal figure who the governments called in to deal with the cases - and now the British government appears intent on delaying publication.
Equally, there is no absolute guarantee the inquiries will take place even though the British government made a commitment it would carry out the judge's recommendations. If the British government goes down that road it will provoke a row with the families and the Irish Government.
The Finucane, Nelson, Hamill and Wright families were heartened by the judge's action. Mr Michael Finucane welcomed Judge Cory's phone call yesterday, as did Ms Diane Hamill, sister of Robert Hamill, who died as a result of a beating from a loyalist mob in Portadown in 1987.
A spokesman for Mr David Wright, father of LVF leader Billy Wright, who was shot dead by the INLA in the Maze prison in 1997, said he was happy that "six years of hard campaigning had been rewarded with the news of Judge Cory's recommendation".
Mr Paul Mageean, of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, said for the family of murdered solicitor Rosemary Nelson, that the British must publish the reports and implement the recommendations.