Human Rights in Ireland

Recently, there have been the rumblings of an emergent pan-Latin American student movement. Crucially, this potential movement coheres around the demand for a right to education. In Colombia and Chile a new front is being fought against the creation and maintenance of private education and the implicit commodification of learning. However, this emergent trans-continental rights-demand is not simply another traditional usage of rights. Very often, when we hear ‘human rights’ we think about them in the most legalistic of senses. They are fetishized as that which the state may guarantee for the subject. As noted by all sorts of critical theorists, such an identification leads to a thorough limitation of political agency. The political subject is figured simply as the individual in need of the state’s protection. I have recently argued, in Human Rights and Constituent Power, that we must begin to think about a different human rights,  a differential human rights. This idea of rights would have, as its condition of existence, a fundamentally split nature. On one side is the closure implicit in the juridical form, but on the other is the radical political demand to reshape the world. I have suggested that we might term this second limb ‘right-ing’ – in that it is a potent and creative process rather than something which is always already given. Let me develop the idea a little more in the context of the radical demand for a right to education instantiated in Chile and Colombia.

The ‘Chilean Winter’ has seen massive student demonstrations against one of the most privatized educational systems in the world. Joined by trade unions and other left organizations, the students have mobilized and manifested themselves in public space. They have fought for the re-establishment of public institutions which would be run on a not-for-profit basis. They have argued against the private universities and secondary schools that  render education as a commodity. Read Full Post »

Following tonight’s successful performance of Whoop it up for Liberty! in Druid Theatre, Galway we would like to share the texts from which extracts were chosen and included in the performance. This link will bring you to a google document which contains the original, full extracts, which have been modified for use in tonight’s performance. It also links the documents to their original source, if available online, and, where relevant, contains links to the images which we feel connect with the pieces chosen for the performance. Thanks again to everyone for supporting this project – we hope we have made a contribution to the open democratic arts, and to exploring further some aspects of Ireland’s human rights history. The performance has been recorded, and we hope to share some clips from the recording with you in the near future.

Many thanks to everyone who supported our funding efforts for Whoop it up for Liberty! Thanks to your support, we reached our funding target and are well on our way to producing this exciting performance in Druid Theatre, Galway on 10 December. Rehearsals are gearing up, and we have an amazing mix of people with personal experience of rights-violations, professional actors, and community activists involved in the performance.

We released many of the tickets for this event to those who donated to the project on Fund It, however, there are still a limited number of tickets available to anyone who would like to attend the performance in Galway on 10 December. The venue is fully accessible, and there will be a hearing loop provided at the performance. We are currently looking into providing other accessibility features, and would like for anyone who is interested in attending to let us know what their requirements are, and we will do our best to ensure that the performance is inclusive and accessible to all, within the constraints of our budget.

To reserve your ticket for the performance, contact Liam Thornton, and if you have specific accessibility requirements, you can contact me. We will be recording the performance on the night and will hope to make the recording available online afterwards – and will also publish the script of the performance on the blog after the performance.

Human Rights in Ireland is delighted to welcome this guest post from Hans Zomer, Director of Dochas on the forthcoming Busan Meeting on Aid Effectiveness. Dochas  along with a number of other Irish NGOs will be attending the Busan meeting, if you would like to keep up todate with developments as they happen, you can follow Dochas on Twitter @dochasnetwork and also their blog

At the end of November, leaders of rich and poor countries from around the world will gather in Busan, South Korea, to discuss how they can make aid more effective. For further background on Busan and its importance, particularly as it tries to set a course for Governments on how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, please see Dochas blog for  our earlier blog posts. The meeting in Busan follows up on early summits on this issue, in particular the 2005 Paris Declaration and the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action, which were organised as aid donors realised that the current donor landscape is not conducive to delivering on the MDGs.

The 2005 summit started from a very technocratic point of view, and formulated a set of principles and mechanisms for greater donor coordination: the idea was to make “overseas aid” more effective. The 2008 summit, rightly, broadened the discussion, and looked at how to get better at bringing about “Development” (not just do aid better), and how to get “civil society” involved. At the Accra summit, Governments realised that to “make poverty history”, the international community must do more to address the root causes of poverty.

Read Full Post »

 As announced in August, the Human Rights in Ireland blog will host a performance on 10 December at 6pm in Druid Theatre, Galway to celebrate Human Rights Day. The event is called 'Whoop it up for Liberty!' - an ironic quote from Connolly's Reconquest of Ireland. As part of the performance, actors, local people and community activists will read aloud from texts commemorating key moments in Irish history which relate to the theme of human rights. The performance will feature first person narratives which highlight the experiences of workers, women, people with disabilities, travellers, language rights activists, asylum seekers, children, prisoners and many others as they relate to human rights in Ireland – from historical perspectives right through to the present day. Thomas Conway, literary manager of Druid Theatre, will direct the performance, which will be followed by a question and answer session where the texts and themes will be further discussed.
 

Since this is a not-for-profit event, we are seeking support to cover our production costs. The director and actors involved are generously volunteering their time, and in order to do justice to the inspiring texts used to create the script, we would like to make this as professional an event as possible. The event has been listed as a creative venture on Fund It to secure crowd source funding for the performance. This link will take you to the Fund It page for the event where you can watch a video clip of some of the actors involved reading from a draft script - and we would appreciate if readers of the blog could repost the link via social media. Donations received will go towards the cost of hiring the venue and rehearsal space, lighting and sound, recording the performance, providing catering for the cast and crew after the performance, producing programme notes for the event, and making the performance accessible to all.

 

This will be the first time an event of this kind has been performed in Ireland, using first-person narratives to explore historical and present-day experiences of human rights across a broad range of issues: identity, belonging, democracy, politics, solidarity, and exclusion. We hope that people will contribute what they can to make the event a success – and we hope to see as many of you as possible on 10th December in Galway!

Tomorrow, Ireland will have its human rights record reviewed under the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR) procedure. Last December, Danielle Kennan and I hosted a blog-symposium that considered some aspects of Ireland’s human rights record in areas such as the role of civil society in informing the UN Human Rights Council of potential human rights issues in Ireland, the rights of children and the rights of prisoners. Since this symposium, there has been engagement by government and non-governmental organisations with wider society on problematic areas of Irish law that may not meet international minimum human rights protection standards. The final Irish UPR Report can be accessed here, while the UN summary of civil society submissions can be viewed here.

Rights Now will be live streaming Ireland’s UPR examination by the UN Human Rights Council from 8.00 am on Thursday, 06 October 2011. For those in and around Dublin, Rights Now will be hosting a breakfast viewing of Ireland’s UPR Review from 8 am in Liberty Hall, Dublin.  In Cork, NASC, the Irish Immigrant Support Centre, will be hosting a viewing (as well as their open day) over coffee from 8 am in Mary Street. In Limerick, Doras Luimní will be hosting a viewing of Ireland’s UPR examination from 8am.

I do stand by the comments I made last December: Read Full Post »

Two leading US civil rights groups, Disability Rights Advocates and the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled have filed a lawsuit claiming that the City of New York and Mayor Michael Bloomberg placed disabled people in life-threatening situations by failing to take their “unique needs” into consideration when planning for emergencies and disasters. The organisations taking the action claim that major disasters in New York City such as September 11^th and Hurricane Irene have highlighted how the city is not prepared to meet the needs of its 900,000 citizens with disabilities during times of emergencies.

During the recent response to Hurricane Irene, there were reports that 75% of the designated emergency shelters in New York were not fully accessible to wheelchair users, the televised emergency announcements did not include American Sign Language and the evacuation maps from the city were not useable by persons with no or low vision. Additionally the modes of transport used for evacuation included school buses, which did not have lifts for wheelchair users.

Read Full Post »

As I noted last week, an opinion by  Advocate General Trstenjak on the rights of asylum seekers under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EUCFR) and EU asylum directives, held that asylum seekers should not be returned from other EU member states to Greece if the fundamental rights of asylum seekers are not upheld. In Ireland, all transfers of asylum seekers to Greece have been suspended since Clarke J. granted leave to appeal her decision in Mirza v Refugee Applications Commissioner to the Supreme Court in 2010. When Clarke J. referred questions in the case of M.E. and others v Refugee Applications Commissioner to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU),  there were 32 similar applications yet to come before the High Court in October 2010.

In M.E. and others v Refugee Applications Commissioner, the five applicants had entered Greece, were requested to leave the country due to illegal entry and made their way to Ireland to claim asylum. The Refugee Applications Commissioner, exercising his powers under the Dublin II Regulation, wanted to return the applicants to Greece so that their asylum claim could be determined there. M.E and the others argued that the procedures for determining asylum claims and reception conditions in Greece were so inadequate that Ireland was obliged to exercise its discretion under Article 3 (2) of the Dublin II Regulation to accept responsibility for examining these asylum claims. Clarke J. in the High Court made a preliminary reference Read Full Post »

We are pleased to welcome this guest post from Dr. Karl Kitching, lecturer in the School of Education at University College, Cork.

There’s no mistaking a rightist Hook when it lands. It has become par for the course to describe ‘socialist’ Dáil deputies in a derogatory way. But ‘atheist’, George? From the same man who argued in the Irish Times on Tuesday September 20th that private schools are more inclusive than others because they were the first to allow Jewish students to enrol?

Let’s clear up a few of the problems with Tuesday’s pillow talk with private schools of the world, before exposing a more important contemporary myth: that there is actually a ‘private versus public’ debate to be had with regard to education in Ireland.

The biggest problem with George Hook’s defense of private schooling is that it was a solo run, so to speak. It is based on his own individual experience, and takes no account of how schooling quality and equality have dramatically changed in Ireland and internationally in the intervening period. Few would dismiss George’s own positive experience of school. But his ‘defence’ is hugely outdated, individualised and romanticised. As far as I am aware, George attended school before the advent of mass second level education. There were few alternatives to private (religious-run) schools during his time.

Read Full Post »

With the recent arrival in Europe of persons from various North Africa countries due to the uprisings, there has been increased focus on the issue of asylum and refuge in Europe. This did lead to some tension between France and Italy, and  broader questions on  free movement rights and borders in the European Union (EU) as a whole. See Cian’s previous post on this issue here. Yesterday’s opinion by Advocate General Trstenjak re-emphasised that the right to seek asylum is a fundamental right, not only under international law, but also under EU law.

When an individual enters the EU for the purpose of claiming asylum , s/he is required to claim in the first EU country that s/he seeks enters. Under the Dublin II Regulation, if s/he subsequently travels onwards to another EU country, s/he can be returned to the first country of entry, unless the subsequent country agrees to examine the protection claim. However, without any burden sharing mechanism, this places great pressure on countries like Greece who are expected to determine individual asylum and protection claims in line with EU minimum legal standards.  The question that arises, and was considered in the opinion of AG Trstenjak in N.S , does a second member state have an obligation to refuse return to the first country of entry, an asylum seeker who could suffer violations of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EUCFR) and other international treaties (in particular the ECHR and Refugee Convention). In answering this Read Full Post »