And "Democratic Institutions of NI" and not "UK". The text really does not say "The ECHR shall apply [in or to] NI" as you want it to do.
Replies
I fear you are the text torturer in this context. I am simply saying that the GFA recognises ECHR compliance as a key safeguard, and that the provisions related to domestic rights protection supplement that underpinning commitment. Exactly as the plain text indicates...
sep 1, 2025, 3:06 pm • 2 0 • view
This is just loose. You have to look at the words. The important part is 5(b). Most of the analysis doesn't get beyond counting the number of times the ECHR is referred to. As if people don't want to believe the words used.
sep 1, 2025, 3:11 pm • 0 0 • view
I am looking at the words! You're the one trying to wriggle off the hook of the literal meaning of 5(b), namely that ECHR compliance is a safeguard for the good functioning of the institutions - while gesturing towards loose arguments allegedly made by others.
sep 1, 2025, 3:50 pm • 2 0 • view
Far be it for me to wade into this discussion on an otherwise totally quiet day for legal opinions, but if we're reading the ECHR to apply only to the devolved institutions at Stormont, is it plausible that the GFA parties ignored the police? 1/
sep 1, 2025, 3:19 pm • 2 0 • view
If not, then we have a problem: because the police were never (from 1972) envisioned to be under devolved institutional control. And if the ECHR was contemplated as a safeguard in a policing context, it would necessarily draw the UKG 2/
sep 1, 2025, 3:19 pm • 1 0 • view
Which was legally responsible for it until the devolution of policing and justice in 2010. And the police is just one example of a context where ECHR violations in the context of NI history aren't *explicitly* a part of Strand One. 3/3.
sep 1, 2025, 3:19 pm • 3 0 • view
Indeed. So badly drafted. Such a shame. I do think however we should look at the words of 5(b) in context, and not what the parties should have agreed if they'd thought about it.
sep 1, 2025, 3:46 pm • 0 0 • view
I suggest, respectfully, that the rest of us are looking at the words in context. The important part (again, with all due respect) is to actually understand that context. None of us are imagining or speculating. We are referencing the facts which surrounded a decade long negotiation.
sep 1, 2025, 3:50 pm • 7 0 • view
No because Strand Five of the MPA explicitly requires that the ECHR be incorporated into NI law, which unless I’m missing some significant quirk of NI law, would bind the police?
sep 1, 2025, 3:53 pm • 0 0 • view
The ECHR referenced in Strand Five has much wider implications on the human rights front from for both the UK and Irish states than Strand One, which is what you would expect from the section titled “Human Rights”.
sep 1, 2025, 3:56 pm • 0 0 • view
What it doesn’t refer to, and no one currently seems to be arguing it does, is a requirement that either the UK or Ireland be members of the ECHR (why would it, it was taken for granted).
sep 1, 2025, 3:56 pm • 0 0 • view
One might think it odd that the permanent and irrevocable commitment of the entire UK (and one would expect, Ireland) to the ECHR would feature in the section about devolved institutions, and not the Constitutional Issue or Human Rights section, or the (British Irish Agreement)
sep 1, 2025, 3:58 pm • 0 0 • view
(Anomalous brackets…)
sep 1, 2025, 4:02 pm • 0 0 • view
If you're referring to the Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity section, then that particular incorporation obligation makes no distinction between devolved and non-devolved institutions in so far as NI is concerned.
sep 1, 2025, 3:58 pm • 0 0 • view
Right. So (as is currently the case under the HRA as I understand it) the PSNI whether under devolved or non-devolved control are to be bound by incorporated Convention rights?
sep 1, 2025, 4:00 pm • 0 0 • view
I may be missing something about the argument here?
sep 1, 2025, 4:01 pm • 0 0 • view
I was responding to the idea that the ECHR as incorporated bound/should bind only the devolved institutions and that is the extent of the incorporation obligations under the GFA. A claim which was made some years ago in another report.
sep 1, 2025, 4:04 pm • 0 0 • view
I'd have thought it arguable that "Democratic Institutions in Northern Ireland" in 5, including 5(b), includes the police and other pre-existing institutions. But it also isn't right, imo, that 5 (or 5(b)) refers to the United Kingdom, the state, as being subject to those constraints.
sep 1, 2025, 4:10 pm • 0 0 • view
I didn't mention that. But the PE report does indeed seem to claim that policing functions back in 1998, and non-devolved national security functions to this day, were not covered by any of the human rights provisions of the GFA. Which IMHO is a manifestly implausible conclusion!
sep 1, 2025, 3:38 pm • 1 0 • view
I think Sister Michael is an appropriate reaction to that.
sep 1, 2025, 3:46 pm • 1 0 • view
As a voter in one of the referendums, I am chuckling at how that argument would go. 'Hooray, huge support for the peace process! Oh did we not make clear that none of the rights provisions applied to national security? Oops, our bad, maybe we should have mentioned that...'
sep 1, 2025, 3:42 pm • 2 0 • view
Would have. Should have. Could have.
sep 1, 2025, 3:48 pm • 0 0 • view