Mr. Colm O'Gorman:

I will begin answering questions and Ms McGowan will follow up on the Council of Europe and EU context. Our European institutions office covers the European region, including both the Council of Europe and the EU.

One of our recommendations is that Ireland should set out its own timeline for signing and ratifying the Istanbul convention but the Presidency should also encourage other EU member states to ratify it. We are back to the question of leadership. We can speak about the role Ireland needs to play as a country that claims to champion human rights issues, quite rightly in the international context in particular, but we need to demonstrate that leadership within the EU and at national level. If one of the founding principles of the EU is human rights, it needs to demonstrate a commitment to that principle. This means advancing, promoting and protecting the human rights of those who live in the EU. It cannot be limited to a dialogue around accession that is dropped from the table the moment a state becomes a member of the club. This is a huge ongoing issue.

We have serious concerns about conditions in direct provision centres, mainly because of the length of time people spend in them. The major difficulty is that children are growing up in direct provision centres and we are concerned about the impact on family life, child development and mental health for those who are forced to live in one room in a contained environment. These people are not able to live freely as families and individuals. Although we regard this area as a pressing concern, we are not actively working in it because we do not have the capacity to do so alongside everything else we need to do. A range of highly credible and effective organisations are focused on the treatment of people in direct provision and the conditions such people experience. At our most recent annual conference our membership adopted a motion calling on the Government to review conditions in direct provision but we regard the timely adoption of a single protection procedure as a core solution to this difficulty. Single protection has been a stated commitment of Governments over many years but we still do not have a procedure. Previous Governments have proposed procedures that would allow all cases to be fully processed within six months. When asylum seekers or refugees come to the State to seek protection it might be appropriate or reasonable to accommodate them in direct provision for a period of six months while the State discharges its responsibilities but to fail to process applications for multiple years, and permit children to grow up in direct provision, is a matter we take very seriously.

On the effects of austerity, when the Government of the day was in negotiations with the troika over the obligations it would be required to sign up to in regard to bank debt, it would have been interesting if it had on hand a counterbalancing set of legally binding obligations to the people who live in this State. The Government could have accepted the need to take on its obligations in the context of the crisis it faced while also asserting legally binding obligations in areas of health, education, social care, protection of humans and other human rights areas. That is why Amnesty International views the incorporation of economic, social and cultural rights into our Constitution as a priority. We need the added strength such protections would give to human rights accountability. They would also give Governments a tool in making difficult decisions around how they use the people's resources to best effect in the interest of the people living in the State. We are concerned about the impact of the economic crisis on human rights. There is no doubt that human rights standards have declined in key areas as a result of austerity. This is similarly evident in several European states. We intend to do more to examine this issue more closely.

Deputy Durkan used powerful language in speaking about guidelines and standards beyond which we should not allow ourselves to go. We would love to reach that point but we are still discussing minimum standards. When I speak to legislators and policy makers about economic, social and cultural rights, I sometimes get the response that these are not real rights. When we advocate the advancement of human rights international law, we do not refer to laws we might have written as an NGO but to laws that were agreed and adopted by states. Deputy Durkan was usefully involved in the development of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. These are not aspirational standards; they are core obligations to which states willingly and voluntarily agreed. We are asking states to respect the laws they wrote and to make them meaningful. We ask Ireland to protect and promote the laws it developed in the international context by observing them at home and showing leadership at EU level and beyond in advancing these core minimum standards. We are gravely concerned about the erosion of human rights standards in a number of areas.

When we speak about a practice as barbaric as FGM, we are not adopting some distant position or sitting here as white Europeans to talk about practices in certain cultures. Many practices in our own recent history would be viewed as equally barbaric by other societies. We live in a State where the gravest human rights violations one can imagine were visited on marginalised groups in the interest of prescribed morality. That might have been explained away through the norms of religious or traditional belief. Our work on FGM, particularly at European level, is driven by rights holder participation. We have a strong voice from women who are directly affected by the experience of FGM and who can guide our work. Rather than speaking as outsiders looking in, we are developing our position based on our engagement with rights holders and trying to find effective solutions based on their experience and what they tell us. We can share more information about these models with the committee if members so wish.

It is always useful to look at the national experience when addressing issues such as violence against women, and there is a great deal we could improve. It is fair to say matters in Ireland have improved in the past decade in particular when we examine the area of gender based violence, sexual violence and domestic violence but we still have a long way to go in that regard. That is not necessarily the focus of this set of recommendations because we are talking about recommendations to the Presidency in the context of its leadership within the European Union.

A key priority for us would be fore Ireland to sign and ratify the Istanbul convention. We have not been given any indication yet that there is a commitment to either sign or ratify the convention of which I am aware; Ms McGowan can correct me if I am wrong about that.

On the question generally of discrimination, something we believe must happen is movement on the anti-discrimination directive, which currently is in a nowhere place. The Minister of State, Deputy Creighton, said it was something she hoped to see advanced during the Presidency but we must be clear that it is member states that are blocking the adoption of the directive. If we want to improve human rights conditions within Europe, we must strengthen both the competency of the EU to address human rights violations where they are occurring and where states are in breach, for instance, of their obligations under the fundamental charter but also strengthen the hand of the institutions, and the anti-discrimination directive is important in that regard.