The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission is anti-Unionist in
composition and outlook, various speakers at a Belfast conference
organized by the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland last month
asserted.
The conference at Schomberg House Orange headquarters which
was attended by the chairman of the Human Rights Commission
Professor Brice Dickson, heard a long catalogue of charges
made against this Government-appointed-quango over its overt
nationalist bias.
Opening the human rights conference, the Orange Grand Master
of Ireland Bro. Robert Saulters said it was natural that the
Orange Order would be involved in the debate on human rights,
not only as the largest social provider in the Protestant
community, but because of the Institution’s commitment
to civil liberties.
“Historically, the Orange Institution looks back to
the Bill of Rights of 1689 in the reign of King William III
which takes its place alongside other great charters of British
liberties such as Magna Carta and the Charter of King Edward
1 in 1297,” said the Grand Master.
Professor Anthony Alcock, from the University of Ulster,
who chaired the conference, said there was a clear perception
that the Human Rights Commission in Northern Ireland was overwhelmingly
anti-Unionist in thought, word and deed.
The question for the Unionist community and even more for
the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, he said, is
how this is addressed?
Mr. Austen Morgan, a London-based barrister who has published
various papers on human rights legislation, gave a highly
critical indictment of the role of the Northern Ireland Human
Rights Commission, particularly in relation to the rights
of Unionists.
Mr. Morgan said that since March 1, 1999, the conduct of
the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission has been marked
by the following:
- Anti-Unionism from the chief human rights commissioner,
Professor Brice Dickson, in a U.K. practitioners’ textbook
(written in February 1999 after his appointment).
- The exclusion of Unionists from the NIHRC by Secretary
of State Mo Mowlam, even though minister Paul Murphy had promised
Parliament that the broad Unionist community and the broad
nationalist community would be represented.
- The effective handing over of the NIHRC to the Committee
for Administration of Justice.
- Interest only in state violations of human rights,
to the almost total exclusion of human rights abuses by non-state
actors, principally republican and loyalist terrorists.
- Selective campaigning for Patrick Finucane and Rosemary
Nelson inquiries, rather than for all lawyers and judges killed
by paramilitaries.
- A naïve but arrogant human rights internationalism,
which makes an imperative of all-Ireland activity, but not
co-operation within the United Kingdom and with other states
in the European Union and Council of Europe.
- Opposition to the further partial bringing into
force of the Human Rights Act 1998 in Northern Ireland in
the spring of 2000, when the U.K. government suggested this
might help resolve disputes about parades.
- The employment of women only, contrary to Northern
Ireland’s anti-discrimination and equality of opportunity
laws.
- Favouritism towards the human rights community (civil
society?), Northern Ireland’s new nomenclatura, and
exclusion of non members from its work, contrary to law.
- Legal intervention on behalf of two nationalist
QCs who refused to make a declaration to serve the Queen as
a client though they had applied for such offices under the
Crown.
- Legal intervention on behalf of the Garvaghy Road,
Portadown, residents over Parades Commission appointments.
- Effective lock-out from the courts of Northern Ireland
as a third-party intervener after a number of reckless interventions,
such interventions held to be ultra vires by Sir Robert Carswell
LCJ, after the NIHRC was refused permission to intervene in
the Omagh inquest.
- Unsuccessful attempt to stop the BBC Panorama programme
on the Real I.R.A. bombing of Omagh in 1998 through an application
for an injunction contrary to the wishes of the relatives
of those killed.
- Enthusiastic support for institutionalised religious
discrimination, as recommended in the Patten Report on policing,
contrary to equality and human rights law.
- Support for the continuing 1976 exclusion of teachers
from Northern Ireland’s fair employment legislation,
despite likely Protestant disadvantage.
- Intervention of a NIHRC member to secure pro-clerical
changes to Europe anti-discrimination law.
- A proposal to the U.K. Government that the NIHRC
should be given powers to: “enter and search premises”;
and to require people “to attend before the Commission
to answer fully and truthfully any question put to him or
her by the Commission”.
Mr. Morgan said he had already proposed that the Northern
Ireland Assembly should constitute its own human rights committee,
on analogy with the one at Westminster.
Professor Brice Dickson refuted the charges made against
his organization, but he urged Unionists to assert their rights
in a way they had not done in the past.
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