THIS week has been a bad week for justice in Scotland.

Tilly Gifford, an environmental campaigner who was spied upon, followed and approached to be recruited to report on fellow social justice activists, had her case for judicial review of the Scottish and Westminster governments’ failure to allow Scottish victims access to a public inquiry rejected by the Court of Session.

Her lawyers argued that the decisions by both the Westminster and Scottish governments breached her human rights and were unlawful.

The judge in Edinburgh ruled that the Scottish government did not have to hold a public inquiry into the issue, stating that human rights laws did not apply in Gifford’s case and they rejected the plea that the Westminster government should extend their inquiry to include Scots.

In making this decision the courts have reinforced a continuing injustice that excludes anyone who fell victim to undercover policing north of the border, whether the undercover officer was from Scotland or part of the Met Police’s Special Demonstration Squad.

This is a national disgrace.

We know for a fact that at the G8 in Gleneagles in 2005 the police deployed 18 undercover officers to infiltrate protest groups. 

We also know that one of those officers was Mark Kennedy, who tricked a number of women into long-term relationships in order to get information and get closer to these protest groups.

Many such officers have for decades befriended grieving families through justice campaigns, and have acted as agents provocateurs at protests and strikes. 

They were involved in helping to blacklist construction workers and the brutal policing we saw during the miners’ strike, causing lives to be ruined and legitimate protest movements to be infiltrated.

Many of these undercover officers have gone on to do quite well for themselves, including Bob Lambert who was an academic at St Andrew’s when his past infiltrating campaigning groups was revealed.

The SNP government knows all of this — I remind them in Parliament on a regular basis — yet they ignore it just the same as the Tory government at Westminster.

This makes no sense and begs the question, what are the government and the police so keen to hide?

Gifford and many others have had their right to privacy violated and were subsequently told their right to information regarding their own lives is to be ignored. If that is not a breach of human rights, I do not know what is.

This is not idle fantasy or the concerns of people who have spent too much time reading conspiracy theories, this happened and I believe it still is happening.

In October The Guardian published a list of over 200 community organisations, civil liberties groups, trade unions and political parties that are among the 1,000 understood to have been spied on and infiltrated by undercover police officers in the UK since 1968.

Many of these groups were about as threatening to national security as a village horticultural society, but they were spied on nonetheless.

The Labour Party wants to know what role this kind of policing has played in the recent politics of Scotland. It seems unimaginable to me that undercover officers would have infiltrated environmental groups and anti-globalisation protests, but with the threat of the break-up of the UK in 2014 they would not have been directly interested in the activities of both sides of the independence debate.

The SNP has refused to listen to Labour’s demands on political policing — failing victims, many of whom are women. As a result we find ourselves in a situation where the only people on the mainland of the UK who will not have access to justice on this issue are the Scottish victims.

How is that standing up for Scotland?

Is the SNP seriously telling the public that, under a Tory home secretary, there will be an inquiry in England and Wales but truth and justice will not be offered to victims in Scotland?

The reasons given for rejecting a parallel inquiry in Scotland are as shallow as they are ridiculous — including: it might delay the UK inquiry, and that there is not sufficient evidence of Scottish officers engaging in this practice to warrant a full inquiry.

This smacks of a cover-up.

I intend on holding the government to account for this scandal and will not rest until there is a full inquiry here in Scotland.

Justice must be delivered.

Neil Findlay is Labour MSP for Lothian.