Republican News · Thursday 15 August 2002

Human rights and power

The PJ McGrory lecture

BY FERN LANE

"Quote" - quote

The annual P J McGrory lecture was delivered by United States Congressman Bruce Morrison, the former special advisor on Ireland to Bill Clinton who was an integral part of the negotiations leading up to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

The subject of his address was the question of human rights, and specifically how human rights should be applied and protected within the framework of a democratic system.

"The story of human rights is about power" he said "Governments - all governments - abuse their power. Democratic governments abuse their power. It's in the nature of things that people who have power trample over the inconvenience of people who stand between them and their particular objectives." The difficulty was, he said, that very often the tendency of governments to ignore the rights of individuals proved to be popular with the majority.

"Human rights is the antidote to that," he said. "It is the thing we fight back with. People have rights that are even more important than the will of the majority.

"That's an easy thing to say, and it is often said with great approval, in theory. But it runs into enormous controversy in real life as majorities don't like to be told that they don't always rule. I think it is very important to think about human rights in that way - as a conflict between what the majority would like and what rights people have in the face of majority power."

Elections, he argued, do not represent the totality of the democratic process. "Democracy is a combination of elections and respect for individual rights, and unless both parts are alive and well, you really don't have a democracy."

After Morrison was elected to the US Congress in 1982, his attention was drawn to the Six Counties, although there were attempts to dissuade him from examining the situation too closely.

"I was warned about dangerous people who would talk to me about the situation in Northern Ireland," he explained. "I listened to that for a little while, but what I mostly heard was about the deprivation of rights, about minorities who were discriminated against, denied political opportunity, housing opportunity, employment opportunity."

He also had first hand experience of the way in which human rights were routinely disregarded by the authorities in the Six Counties. On his first trip to Ireland in 1987, he was driving around Derry with Gerry ó hEara, then a Sinn Féin councillor.

"We were driving behind a Saracen vehicle and they stopped, got out and sort of dragged us out of the car and held us at gunpoint for an hour. Now, I didn't know exactly what offence I was committing - apparently it was the offence of being with a Sinn Féin councillor - but it was quite an experience. Most members of Congress do not get held at gunpoint. We do a lot of dumb things and get hauled up by constituents, but that was one step more than I expected.

"While they were holding me, I took out a little piece of paper and started to write down the number on the epaulette of the officer. He came over and grabbed it out of my hand and said 'you have just committed an offence; collecting information about the security forces'.

"That was the world into which I was introduced here, a world in which a perfectly innocent drive around Derry was interrupted. What they had in mind I won't speculate, but certainly I think they were trying to send a message and I am afraid that they sent the wrong one to me, which was that there were certain issues here which need to be addressed and apparently outsiders looking at those issues make them nervous."

With regard to the current state of the peace process, he said: "There is a dangerous thing going on in the peace process of treating human rights like they are a concession. You have all heard that discussion and it is one of the most pernicious things that has been an interference in the peace process and in actually implementing various kinds of agreements that are part of the Good Friday Agreement in respect of the creation of human rights institutions and protections."

However, "it doesn't get discussed when considering to have an assembly or not to have an assembly; will the executive survive, will it be collapsed, what will happen in the next election. People saying that these [human rights] parts of the agreement have to be implemented are often seen as missing the point."

But, he said, it was missing the point to ignore that human rights are at the core of the whole conflict. "When people look back and think why didn't this problem get solved before it went into the ditch of the Troubles, they might just take a step back and remember that people stood up and marched and laid out very moderate sets of human rights. Officials said 'later'."

There was, he said, "a basic failure to recognise that you cannot keep total control with force. You can only work with people through means of respect and dignity, rights and democracy.

"No one should forget that history and leap ahead to political institutions in the electoral sense. They are important, they are part of human rights; the right to participate, to vote, to be represented by the people of your choice. But the right to be protected from the abuse of the majority and the state are equally important, as is the right to be treated equally and fairly by the authorities, regardless of who is in power. There will not be a successful end to the peace process if those things are ignored.

"The current state of affairs is like a soap opera. For an outsider it is a little hard to understand when you see something that would have to be described as progress and its always in crisis because it seems to be from one view or another to be failing. I am an optimist with respect to the process but I'm not Pollyanna. People can wreck it if they really set out to do that, but it has an inherent sense to it, an inherent justice to it, an inherent positive sum for all communities to it. So it shouldn't fail."