Human Rights in Ireland

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 »

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 »

I have blogged (see here and here) about the story of Troy Davis, a man who has been on death row in Georgia, USA for over two decades. Davis is scheduled to be executed next Wednesday. Davis was convicted in 1991 of the murder of off-duty police officer Mark Allen MacPhail. There was no physical or forensic evidence linking Davis to the crime and the murder weapon was never found. Seven of the nine witnesses whose testimony was used to convict Davis later recanted, many of them saying that they were pressurised by the police into saying that Davis was the murderer.  In March of this year  the US Supreme Court refused Davis’ final appeal. (See my blog on the appeal here), setting the stage for Davis’ fourth execution date.

Davis’ execution is scheduled for Wednesday at 7pm at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. Davis’ lawyers will make a final bid for clemency to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday 19th September. In the lead up to the clemency hearing, community activists, including Robert Brooks from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), have been making impassioned pleas to the members of the Board to grant Davis clemency. If the clemency hearing is not successful, Davis will be executed on Wednesday.

The Amnesty International petition calling on Georgia District Attorney Larry  Chisolm to act to halt the execution and the petition asking the Board of Pardons and Parole to grant clemency may be signed by following this link.

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!

Few are willing to make comparisons between this past year’s radical political activity in the UK – from the student protests to the major TUC demonstration – and the Tottenham riots. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: there is no unifying political goal of these ‘looters’, ‘hooligans’ and ‘thugs’. Theirs instead appears to be a ‘consumerism of the excluded’ – as someone quipped recently. But there is a common denominator – that is the role of the police in patrolling the fringes of ordered liberal society.

The response to every and any hint that the police might have behaved badly is remarkably similar in so many instances. Firstly, denial: ‘he shot first’, ‘he moved towards me’, ‘he was being restrained for his own safety’. Then, if the pressure is great enough and the evidence obvious enough: acceptance and repentance. This comes with promises that any bad apples will be sought out, plucked from the tree and binned. Then finally, when the fury has dissipated, charges and complaints are dropped, or one person takes the hit – rarely anything beyond a slap on the wrist. As Alex Wheatle says, for instance, no police officer has ever been convicted for the death of a black person in custody. This should not surprise us. The police will close ranks in an attempt to protect their own. The political and legal establishment will tolerate this to a certain extent. They recognise ‘the difficult job that officers do’. Yet, this type of reasoning misses the everyday and ordinary violence of the police, and by extension that of the state (and the law). A different way of looking at this emerges when we refuse to accept, for a moment, that police violence is automatically or necessarily legitimate. Read Full Post »

Amid accusations of educational apartheid in the admissions policies of Irish schools, a landmark Circuit Court ruling in Clonmel allowed an appeal by a secondary school against an Equality Authority ruling that it had indirectly discriminated against a Traveller boy in refusing to admit him. The admissions policy of the Christian Brothers High School in Clonmel is a familiar one in the Irish educational landscape: that the applicant be Catholic; that he would have attended a recognised feeder primary school; and that he would have had a father or brother who attended the school prior to him. Read Full Post »

Last week I wrote a post dealing with the apparent demise of the political voice of Loyalism, the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). In the week that has followed the other side of the Loyalist coin, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), has orchestrated sectarian riots in Belfast by attacking Catholic homes in Short Strand. The ongoing violence has lead to three shootings, including that of a journalist. On the surface this rioting represents a repugnant but containable throwback to the ‘bad old days’ of sectarian strife. However to examine Loyalism in isolation would be a mistake, throughout the ‘Troubles’ the tit-for-tat interplay between Republicans and Loyalists defined the conflict.

An attempt has been made by political Loyalists such as those in the PUP to imbue Loyalism with a more positive identity. Documents such as Principles of Loyalism attempted to distil Loyalist thought and forge it into an identity which could apply in times of peace as well as of conflict. However this rebranding exercise, and political Loyalism with it, has largely failed. The Ulster Democratic Party(UDP), the political wing of the Read Full Post »

‘The vice of the rule is precisely that, in an endeavour not to single out those communities where forced marriage is likeliest to occur, it fails to discriminate.’

Forced married is not yet criminalised in the UK and is generally regulated at civil law. [1] Yesterday, the UK Supreme Court began to hear oral arguments in Bibi v SSHD (reported at High Court and Court of Appeal as Quila v SSHD.) It may be useful to review where we are with the case now. The case concerns two individuals; Pakistani citizen Shakira Bibi and Chilean national Diego Aguilar,[2] who were refused permission to join their UK citizen spouses in the UK under an immigration rule designed to prevent forced marriages. There was no suggestion that either marriage at issue was forced. However, as teenagers the couples fell afoul of this rule since it is essentially an age restriction. It provides that individuals aged under 21 may not settle in the UK under a spousal visa. The rule operates as an irrebuttable presumption that a marriage between young people, one of whom is not a UK national, is a forced marriage. The Home Office’s rationale for imposing the rule is that a significant proportion of those forced into marriage are aged 18-20, that slightly older individuals are better placed to resist pressure to marry, and that removing the immigration status incentive to forcing younger people into marriage would therefore do more than provide temporary relief for some people at risk of forced marriage, but would actually prevent them (the policy is set out in great detail in the High Court judgment). Compassionate exceptions may be made where, for instance a wife is already pregnant, but there is no scope for a couple to escape the application of the rule by demonstrating that their marriage was not in fact forced and so the exemption was not applied to the appellants.

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Durham Law School and the Faculty of Laws, Oxford, will host a one-day workshop on Economic and Social Rights in a Time of Austerity on 30 June in Oxford.

Date: 30 June 2011
Venue: Oxford Faculty of Laws

The last two years have seen growing evidence of the deleterious global impact of the economic crisis on the poorest in society. Domestically, there is increasing concern about the potential impacts of the Comprehensive Spending Review and other ‘austerity measures’ on the most vulnerable in the UK. At the same time, there has been a rising interest in the development of human rights accountability and adjudication in the area of economic and social rights (ESR) at the domestic, European and international levels.

This raises the question of whether ESR can play a role (whether as justiciable ‘hard’ rights or as normative values shaping and influencing policy) in challenging attempts by government to roll back basic entitlements of the poorest in society, particularly in relation to housing, social welfare and children’s rights. In light of this, the workshop aims to explore the role of human rights, and particularly ESR, in the context of austerity policies fashioned in the wake of the global financial crisis. It does so though focussing on four main themes: Monitoring, Mainstreaming, Legal Processes and Equality. It features leading ESR experts working in law, academia, the public sector and civil society. Read Full Post »

We are pleased to welcome this guest post from Anne Neylon, who is a PhD candidate in Law at University College Cork. The Court of Justice of the European Union has criticised Ireland’s failure to take prescribed steps to set out in law how it will implement into domestic law standards on asylum procedures agreed by EU Member States.

On the 7^th April 2011, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) found that Ireland had failed to fully transpose Directive 2005/85/EC (the Procedures Directive) within the prescribed period. The CJEU found that by failing to provide the minimum standards for the granting and withdrawing of refugee status as provided for in Article 43 of the Procedures Directive, Ireland had failed in its obligations under Article 258 TFEU. Under Article 258 TFEU, the Commission may bring infringement proceedings against a Member State.

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