Senior Tory rules out plan for NI Bill of Rights
DESPITE a multi-million pound publicity campaign for a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights, a senior Tory last night said that a Conservative government would not implement the legislation.
Addressing the Northern Ireland Bar in Belfast last night, shadow justice secretary Dominic Grieve, one of the most senior members of David Cameron's front bench, said that the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) went "a long way outside its remit" in what it proposed for a Bill of Rights.
Speaking to the gathering of senior legal figures, the QC said that the Conservatives instead believed there should be a UK Bill of Rights, with a Northern Ireland section, to replace the Labour Government's Human Rights Act.
While there is little practical difference between a UK Bill of Rights with a Northern Ireland sub-section and a separate Northern Ireland Bill of Rights, proponents of the latter have long objected to it being subsumed into a UK-wide law.
But Mr Grieve said: "The NIHRC report, as has been widely acknowledged, went a long way outside the remit that had been laid down for it.
"Although I recognise its good intent, it produced a blueprint for a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland which if implemented would represent a fundamental constitutional change.
"So widespread a vision of justiciable rights is contained within it that it is difficult to disagree with the verdict of Owen Polley writing in the Guardian – a paper normally sympathetic to the creation of greater protection for human rights – that 'the NIHRC had become a quasi-political pressure group campaigning single-mindedly for a maximalist interpretation of "rights", which included handing responsibility for socio economic policy to the judiciary'."
Mr Grieve said that there was "no desire" for implementation of the wide-ranging socio-economic proposals put forward by the NIHRC.
Mr Grieve said that the Conservatives' plans for a UK Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act would be based upon principles from ancient legal documents such as Magna Carta, Magna Carta Hibernia of 1216, Habeas Corpus and the Bill of rights of 1689, "reflecting Common law traditions of liberty and freedom from state oppression".
Speaking to the News Letter after a meeting with NIHRC chief commissioner Professor McWilliams yesterday, Mr Grieve said that he supported Secretary of State Shaun Woodward's decision to reject most of the proposals put forward by the NIHRC.
He said that he believed Professor McWilliams was "suspicious" but "not overtly hostile" to the Tory proposals.
"I think Monica's commission strayed outside its frame of reference and I think that has been recognised by the Government.
"In fact I also suspect it has been recognised by the Irish Government because they haven't particularly made any noise to support it. We would be minded to deal with the Belfast Agreement obligations within the UK Bill of Rights which would also mean that you wouldn’t have a duplication of legislation and frankly, with the way it’s taken so long already, it gives us a much better prospect of getting it resolved.”
The NIHRC is funded directly from Westminster, rather than by the Assembly. Asked whether he believed the Commission provided value-for-money, given that the Bill of Rights advice it has spent so long producing had been emphatically rejected, Mr Grieve said: “Well its clearly devoted a great deal of its time to this (the Bill of Rights advice) but in fairness when we saw them today they also pointed out that they are doing some other projects on trafficking and the rights of elderly people in nursing homes.
“Now that is, if I may say so, very much the sort of work which the Equality and Human Rights Commission would do in England and Wales.”
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Monday 28 May 2012
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