Human Rights in Ireland

We are delighted to welcome this guest post from Maeve O’Rourke (left) who is a Harvard Law School Global Human Rights Fellow for 2010-2011 and a graduate of UCD and HLS.

It is now a year since the advocacy group, Justice for Magdalenes, provided the Dail with draft language for a redress scheme for survivors of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. Still, the government denies any state liability for the Magdalene Laundries abuse, maintaining that the laundries were private institutions, never regulated or inspected by the State. Flying in the face of the government’s argument is a series of international legal obligations upon the Irish state to prevent and suppress slavery and forced labour by non-state actors, beginning in 1930.

The very fact that the Magdalene laundries were not subject to regulation or inspection, when the State was aware of their nature and function, was a gross violation of the State’s duty to protect its citizens from such fundamental attacks on human freedom and dignity as slavery and forced labour. In the Ryan Report and the broadcast media, survivor accounts of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries tell of abuse that matches up with a definition of slavery given by the UN Secretary General in reference to the League of Nations 1926 Slavery Convention: absolute control over a person, their labour and the product of that labour. The accounts further conform to the definition of forced or compulsory labour under the 1930 International Labour Organisation Forced Labour Convention: all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily. Read Full Post »

On Friday, Jurist reported that the European Court of Human Rights has found trafficking to be a violation of Article 4. The Court’s decision in Rantsev v. Cyprus and Russia is to be greatly welcomed given the prevalence of trafficking in Europe and the importance that trafficking be regarded first and foremost as a human rights issue – not simply a criminal justice matter. (The issue of trafficking in Ireland and the shortcomings of the Irish legal framework in terms of addressing the problems faced by many victims of trafficking has been previously addressed on this blog).

The applicant in Rantsev, Mikhaylovich Rantsev, a Russian national, brought a complaint in relation to the trafficking, and the circumstances surrounding the death, of his daughter in Cyprus. He alleged violations of Articles 2, 3, 4, 5 and 8 of the Convention resulting from the lack of sufficient investigation into the circumstances of the death of his daughter, the lack of adequate protection of his daughter by the Cypriot police while she was still alive and the failure of the Cypriot authorities to take steps to punish those responsible for his daughter’s death and ill-treatment. He also complained under Articles 2 and 4 about the failure of the Russian authorities to investigate his daughter’s alleged trafficking and subsequent death and to take steps to protect her from the risk of trafficking. Finally, he complained under Article 6 of the Convention about the inquest proceedings and an alleged lack of access to court in Cyprus.

The Court held only the complaints under Articles 2, 3, 4 and 5 to be admissible. It ultimately decided that it was not necessary to consider separately the applicant’s complaint under Article 3 of the Convention. The Court ruled that Cyprus had violated Article 2 of the Convention due to its failure to conduct an effective investigation into Ms Rantseva’s death. The Court also found Cyprus to be in contravention of Article 5 of the Convention.

The most interesting element of the decision, however, is the Court’s findings with regard to Article 4 ECHR. Read Full Post »

The Irish Times reports today that Minister for Education, Batt O’Keeffe, has said that former residents of Magdalen laundries are not eligible for compensation from the Residential Institutions Redress Board. Mr O’Keeffe was replying in a letter to Tom Kitt TD, who had made representations to the Minister concerning former residents of the laundries.

He did so on behalf of James Smith, associate professor at the English department and Irish studies programme in Boston College and author of Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, (2008, Manchester University Press). In his letter, Mr O’Keeffe stated that ‘in terms of establishing a distinct scheme for former employees of the Magdalen laundries, the situation in relation to children who were taken into the laundries privately or who entered the laundries as adults is quite different to persons who were resident in State-run institutions.’

An exception to this, he said, would be children who were transferred from a State-regulated institution to a Magdalen laundry and suffered abuse while resident there. This differentation was justified was on the basis that the State was still responsible for the welfare and protection of children transferred to a Magdalen laundry from a State-regulated institution ‘provided they had not been officially discharged from the scheduled institution’. In doing so, the Minister perpetuates the historical failure of the State to recognise and give effect to its responsibility to ensure the protection of adult occupants of the Laundries.

Read Full Post »