Human Rights in Ireland

When it comes to errors of law in Westminster politics, you live by the sword and you die by the sword. Teresa May, the UK home Secretary, made huge capital at her last Conservative Party Conference in 2011 by trashing the human rights judgment that, as she described it, prevented an illegal immigrant from being deported “because – and I am not making this up – he had a pet cat”. As Adam Wagner of the UK Human Rights Blog pointed out, the decision had nothing to do with the individual in question having a cat, and everything to do with the Home Office’s failure to follow its own guidance on the deportation of foreign national offenders with a settled partner in the UK. But it was served its purpose as a banner under which to unite the Tory right in loathing towards the Human Rights Act 1998. When the UK Justice Secretary Ken Clarke pointed out the error in May’s example, he was crushed beneath a band wagon of right-wing indignation. Read Full Post »

Supergrass. A word forever associated with Northern Ireland in the 1980s. A bit like crispy pancakes and Dallas, it was difficult to grow up in the province in the 1980s and escape exposure to the stream of supergrass trials (not that I’m claiming the exposure had as much immediate impact on my three-year-old self as, well, crispy pancakes). Read Full Post »

Judges in England and Wales have long been sensitive of the boundaries of their authority under the Judicial Review jurisdiction. Lord Hope recently sought to highlight the limits of the judicial role in the Axa Insurance (2011) case, by contrasting it with the focus of Parliament (at [49]):

While the judges, who are not elected, are best placed to protect the rights of the individual, including those who are ignored or despised by the majority, the elected members of a legislature of this kind are best placed to judge what is in the country’s best interests as a whole.

Today the High Court provided a nuanced judgment in a judicial review action brought over the raise in university tuition fees to a maximum of £9000 which will be introduced in September 2012. Although the claimant teenagers (Katy Moore and Callum Hurley, pictured above left) were unsuccessful in their bid to have the Court quash the Higher Education (Higher Amount) Regulations 2010 which introduced the fees, the judges did recognise that ministers had failed to fully carry out some of their Public Sector Equality Duties (PSEDs), which require that consideration be given to whether the decision to increase tuition fees had a disproportionate (and hence, potentially indirectly discriminatory) impact on protected groups within society. Read Full Post »

The publication of the Bassiouni Report into human rights abuses in Bahrain in late November seemed to offer a turning point for international human rights. This Blog has previously examined some of the claims laid against Bahrain during the security crackdown against Shiite protesters during the Arab Spring (see here). Bahrain’s reaction to the welter of international criticism of the actions of its security forces (see Amnesty International’s new report upon the Arab Spring, “Year of Rebellion”, p.32-36 for a useful overview), however, has been very different from those of other Arab governments. Read Full Post »

In recent months the issue of inquiries into killings or torture which either involved, or which were strongly suspected of involving, the UK’s armed forces, police and security services, has seemed almost as regular a feature of newspaper stories as the state of the Euro Zone. Many of these stories come from Northern Ireland, including the re-opening of the Ballymurphy Inquests (into the deaths of eleven people shot dead by UK armed forces on the Ballymurphy estate during Operation Demetrius in 1971) and the pressure on the UK Government to hold a full Public Inquiry into allegations of police collusion in the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane (pictured above left) in 1989. At the end of October, David Cameron rejected Geraldine Finucane’s ongoing efforts to secure a full public inquiry into her husband’s murder (instead a QC will review UK Government papers regarding the murder). Read Full Post »

The cuts agenda in the UK continues to cast a particularly deep shadow over Northern Ireland. The gleaming edifice of the Titanic Quarter (pictured left) in Belfast bears witness to the scale of public spending in Northern Ireland. Nonetheless, the 15-year and £7 billion development project remains, in an irresistible pun, the tip of a public-spending iceberg. As Henry McDonald flagged-up this week, public spending in Northern Ireland continues to outstrip levels in the remainder of the UK: Read Full Post »

As the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) prepares for its new Chief Commissioner to (Prof. Micheal O’Flaherty) take office in September  (see Liam Thornton’s post here) the perpetually-embattled body seems to be steeling itself for a further assault on its existence. Commentators such as Alex Kane in the Newsletter have in recent weeks been baying for the DUP to take on what he regards as a “farce” of an institution (although, in fairness to him, Kane would primarily like to see any sign from life from Stormont amidst the legislative drift since the Assembly elections). The Commission’s June proposal for an “all Island” Charter of Rights (prepared jointly with the Irish Human Rights Commission) received a typically hostile response from the Unionist parties (despite Fiona de Londras noting here that the proposal essentially sought to no more than codify disparate rights sources already shared across Ireland). This distrust is rooted in the influence of the Committee on the Administration of Justice on the first incarnation of the Commission and on repeated claims that the concept of human rights is focused exclusively on the conduct of public officials and therefore fails to serve the victims of terrorism (which I’ll return to below).

Worse, even senior members of Northern Ireland’s legal professions lined up in the weeks after the proposal’s publication to indirectly attack the “legalisation” of public discourse in the North. Northern Ireland’s Attorney General, John Larkin QC, spoke to the Newsletter in the following terms: Read Full Post »

July has been a good month for the UK Parliament’s select committee system. Backbench parliamentarians, not often in the limelight, such as Tom Watson MP, were in the centre of high political drama as Rupert and James Murdoch attempted to fend off the questioning of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Less heralded, but no less important, have been the efforts of the Foreign Affairs Committee to increase the pressure on the UK Government to take a clear stance regarding claims of serious human rights abuses against Sri Lanka’s Government in the course of its military  offensive in Northern Sri Lanka in May 2009 which culminated in the defeat of the military forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the annihilation of the group’s leadership. Read Full Post »

Today the Court of Appeal for England and Wales handed down one of the most important decisions on freedom of expression in recent years – a decision which allows us to consider the boundaries of the right and the restrictions upon it (whether under the Communications Act 2003 in the UK or under Article 40.6.1.i of the Constitution of Ireland)

In November 2008 Jon Gaunt (pictured left), one of the UK’s best known “shock jock” radio hosts interviewed Michael Stark, the Cabinet Member for Children’s Services at Redbridge London Borough Council, on the subject of a proposal before the Council to prevent smokers from becoming foster parents because of the potential harm passive smoking could do to children. Within moments, the interview became a tirade as Gaunt taunted the councillor, calling him in short order a ‘Nazi’, an ‘ignorant pig’ and a ‘health fascist’. Read Full Post »

Today’s news of the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by a US Special Forces team has prompted excited discussion of whether the event marks the end (or at least the decisive turning point) in the conflicts that, for a decade, US policy makers have styled as the “War on Terror”. Normally sober scholars of terrorism, like Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, have been moved to laud the “disruption of al-Qaida in the short term” and to conjecture that the killing “truly removes the motives that would likely reconstitute al-Qaida in the future.”

US and UK Government officials, by contrast, have been quick to counter that the likelihood of retaliatory attacks means that, in the short-term at least, both would be on “full alert“. Jason Burke has written with authority on the options for leadership succession available to Al Qaeda, noting the potential for Ayman al-Zawahiri (“good on ideology, strong on strategy and even organisation”) to assume full control of the organisation. Moreover, as Julian Borger has concluded: Read Full Post »