Republican News · Thursday 30 May 2002

Mary Robinson pinpoints key human rights issue

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, ex-President Mary Robinson, gave the address at the second Annual Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), which she, Kader Asmal, Michael Farrell and others founded.

Even though not in the way many in the crowded hall might have expected, it was widely recognised as highly significant.

Mary Robinson spoke eloquently of the seam that divides International human rights conventions and agreements to which nations have signed from their corresponding failures to legislate these rights into domestic legislation. She also cited the failure to refer in the coutrts to such conventions that Ireland has signed.

Crucially, she instanced the recent judgement in the Supreme Court over cases concerning children who need secure accommodation and care, which the state has continued to fail to provide. Some two years ago, Justice Kelly threatened to injunct the Ministers of Education, Health and Justice to provide the places the Eastern Health Board had undertaken in his court to provide.

In a crucial judgement last December, the Supreme Court held that socio-economic rights are non-judiciable, yet there was no reference in this judgement to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, or the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both of which Ireland has signed.

In the Supreme Court case, Justice Keane said: "I would have the gravest doubts as to whether the courts at any stage should assume the function of declaring what are today frequently described as 'socio-economic' rights guaranteed by Article 40 of the Constitution." He went on to add, that in his view, the resolution of this question must await a case in which it is fully argued.

d yet, as Mary Robinson went on to point out, that very same article in our constitution was taken virtually verbatim by the Indian constitution and their Supreme Court had decided that in virtue of this article socio-economic rights were judiciable.

In the current climate of debate on rights commissions and the need for a Human Rights Bill under the Good Friday Agreement, the issue of socio-economic rights is crucial. Many would argue that it underlies all rights that go to constitute equality.

But it raises the whole issue of states signing up to international covenants, even though the decisions and behaviour of their respective governments do not conform with respecting those rights. Without a robust body of civic society defending human rights, governments' commitment to the UN conventions, which Mary Robinson has done much to advance in her term as UN High Commissioner become so much mouthwash.

Mary Robinson may not have been free to discuss what everyone hoped to hear - the story of her travails at the UN in the face of some of the worst abuses of human rights across the world. Her observations on the 26 County state's passage towards implementing human rights and incorporating UN conventions into the Constitution were, however, more than salient.