Human Rights in Ireland

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.

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 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.

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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.

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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 »

The impending eviction of travellers from Dale Farm in Essex, delayed again but scheduled for Friday or Saturday, raises the question of whether Basildon Council’s actions will be a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, as directly applied in the UK Human Rights Act 1998. There have been a number of cases involving Travellers and Roma before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, but while the Roma have been relatively successful in defending their rights, the Travellers have won only one case. Read Full Post »

The blog authors are organising an event in Druid Theatre, Galway on 10 December this year, to mark Human Rights Day. The event is tentatively called Human Rights in Ireland: A People’s History and is somewhat modelled on The People Speak – the documentary based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. The event will involve actors and non-actors alike, reading aloud excerpts from texts celebrating key moments which shaped human rights discourse in Ireland (whether on a personal or societal level). We are particularly interested in texts which relate to personal experiences and understandings of human rights, or indeed, violations of rights.

As we are currently putting together a script for the event, we welcome suggestions from you, the readers, for texts which you think are significant and relate to people’s experiences of human rights. Texts from a broad range of sources will be used – books, film, audio recordings, archival material, etc. We are particularly interested in receiving suggestions of surprising or unusual texts which we might not otherwise come across. As a rule of thumb, most of the extracts selected should not exceed about 5 minutes when read aloud. About 20 extracts in all will be included in the reading, and we are reserving a quarter of these for suggestions from the blog readers – although the final decision as to whether a text is used or not will be made by the blog authors. Suggestions can be posted in the comments below, or emailed to myself, Charles O’Mahony or Deirdre Duffy – the organisers of the event. We are aiming to complete a full draft of the script by 7 September, so if you could send us suggestions by then we would appreciate it. Further information on the event will be posted in the coming weeks – so stay tuned!

There is an interesting article in the Winnipeg Free Press about discriminatory laws that permit the payment of below minimum wages to persons with disabilities.  See here.   Employment law in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan authorise this underpayment provided that the responsible Minister issues a permit.  A freedom of information request showed that 15 permits have been issued in the past 5 years.  See here.  There is a similar provision in Irish law by way of section 35 of the Employment Equality Acts 1998-2008.  Section 35 provides that it is not unlawful for an employer to pay a different rate to an employee with a disability “by reason of that disability, the employee is restricted in his or her capacity to do the same amount of work (or to work the same hours) as a person who is employed to do work of that description but who is without that disability.”  It is my understanding that this provision is rarely used in Ireland.  The rationale presumably for allowing different rates of pay to disabled employees is to facilitate persons with disabilities to acquire the skills and experience necessary to actively participate in the labour market.  However, these types of provisions are ineffective, seldom used and ultimately serve to undermine the social capital of persons with disabilities.    Regardless of the intentions the practice raises many issues from a human rights perspective, particularly in light of the Read Full Post »