Ms Sara Boyce:

Go raibh maith agat. I am a policy co-ordinator with Include Youth, a rights-based NGO working with young people at risk and vulnerable young people. We are also members of the Human Rights Consortium. With other children and young people's organisations, we have been actively involved in the campaign for a bill of rights since its inception, on the basis that children and young people, who form a quarter of the population in the North, are among the most vulnerable in society and currently lack a comprehensive legal framework for protection of their rights. From 2001, when the Human Rights Commission had its first consultation in the distant past, Include Youth has responded to consultation on behalf of the young people with whom we work, right up to the second consultation from the UK Commission on a bill of rights last year. We have been consistently advocating for a strong bill of rights that would include protections for children and young people. In 2001 I was involved in consulting with P7 schoolchildren - 11-year-olds - from all education sectors across the North, including maintained schools, state schools, Irish language schools and special educational needs schools. Those schoolchildren are now in adulthood, having turned 18 years of age. It is deeply disappointing that the promise made to them in the Good Friday Agreement was not realised throughout their childhood, so that they went through their childhood without the rights protections they had been promised. We will soon be into a second generation, which is worrying for all the reasons we have heard already.

The Human Rights Consortium has had a number of engagements with the committee. We want to avail of the opportunity to put some concrete proposals to the committee. In view of the committee's remit with regard to the implementation of the Agreement, we are interested to hear the committee's plans as we approach its 15th anniversary. The consortium believes that an important exercise the committee could usefully undertake would be to conduct a review or audit of the implementation of the Agreement, which would obviously include an assessment of where the bill of rights process is at, as well as the development of concrete proposals regarding a roadmap to move us forward towards ultimate delivery of the bill of rights. We also hope there will be a full debate on the Agreement's implementation in April and that the committee will use its influence to ensure that debate happens.

We extend an invitation to the committee to come to the North again and spend some time with the consortium's member groups in both loyalist and Nationalist communities - but also other communities that are sometimes overlooked - because a bill of rights would apply to all communities that most need and would benefit from the protections it could offer. On behalf of the delegation I thank the committee for the time it has given us. We will be happy to take questions and comments.