Dangerous Liaisons
by Austin Morgan
Fortnight April 2000
A local bill of rights is left-over business from earlier, now superceded, times. Northern Ireland will, undoubtedly, benefit from changes in United Kingdom human rights law in coming years.
While the CAJ has become part of the state (though some commissioners behave at times like student revolutionaries), the contribution of the NIHRC-sadly-has not been to instill a genuine human rights consciousness in regional public administration; rather, its role, in a United Kingdom state given to appeasement, has been bait in confidence building for republicans-the commissioners seem willing to be hooked.
The perception is that the republican movement is vindicated by the European court of human rights (the Gibraltar SAS killings), and that the United Kingdom government loses time after time (seven adverse findings since 1966).
Sinn Féin proposed an all-Ireland human rights commission in the multi-party negotiations (this survives in the idea of a joint committee between Belfast and Dublin, even though the Irish government has yet to set up its human rights commission, or incorporate the European convention on human rights as it promised in the Belfast Agreement).
Thus, when Peter Mandelson, in his interview in the Observer on 20 February, following the suspension of devolution, sought to tempt the IRA back to the de Chastelain commission, one of the five items proffered included a bill of rights drawn up by the NIHRC by the end of the year.
The details have not been made clear. But, if the United Kingdom government
is now committed to a bill of rights for Northern Ireland, the NIHRC should
consider the following for inclusion, drawn from international instruments
and experience, to reflect the particular circumstances of Northern Ireland:
the Mitchell principles of democracy and non-violence; duties to complement
rights; procedural changes to facilitate the horizontal effect under the
HRA 1998.
Most likely, the secretary of state was only spinning. The lord chancellor
is unlikely to have been consulted, and the senior judiciary, which helped
make the HRA 1998, would, confronted by NIHRC gesture law from Northern
Ireland, baulk at the damage this would do a nascent human rights culture
throughout the United Kingdom. |
