NI abortion law changes ‘in breach of UN disability treaty’

The report comes from the obscurely-named ‘Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’ of the House of Lords, made up of three Tories, three Labour peers, two Lib-Dems and two independents.

It was published last week and voices a number of criticisms of the government, which altered the law in March so that abortion up to 12 weeks is totally unrestricted in Northern Ireland.

Abortion up to 24 weeks is permissible if it would harm the woman’s mental health to continue the pregnancy. And abortion is allowed up to full term in the event a foetus shows signs of serious disability.

Firstly, the report says that the six-week consultation period for the report was “too short for so sensitive a topic”.

Not only that, but the consultation “took place during the General Election period and in the run up to Christmas – neither of which conforms with best practice”.

And the fact the government brought the changes for just as Parliament was going into a period of recess had the effect of “denying Parliament an opportunity for scrutiny before the instrument came into effect”.

The report goes on to say that, given 79% of the responses to the consultation opposed liberalising the law, the government should have “explained in more detail” why it felt the need to enforce it upon the Province.

One of the major driving forces behind the change in the law was a report from a UN body called the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (or CEDAW – a group which oversees a UN convention of the same name).

The committee ruled in 2018 that the effective denial of abortion services in Northern Ireland is an act of “violence against women”.

An opposition amendment in the Commons then forced the government to enact a law to remedy this “violence” by greatly liberalising abortion rules.

What the Lords’ report says is that two Tory MPs claim this conflicts with an international treaty called the ‘UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities’.

Whilst the report says there “appears to be a question over which UN Convention should take priority”, the government believes it is “fully compliant with all the conventions” – and in any case, the disability treaty “does not have the status of binding EU law”.

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