Mr. Les Allamby:

I thank the joint committee for inviting us to speak. I have inherited a strong long-standing working relationship with the Irish commission. This has been reinforced in the early days of both of our tenures as chief commissioners. I am particularly pleased that we are able to make a joint presentation to the committee today. I would like to lay out what we know about the proposal to repeal the UK Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights, before exploring the ramifications of such a measure for the Belfast Agreement. I will be more than happy to take questions on that.

In September 2014, the UK Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced at the Conservative Party conference her intention to repeal the Human Rights Act. These kinds of announcements are sometimes no more than a play for the gallery, but in this case the announcement was followed almost immediately by the publication by the Conservative Party of a document, Protecting Human Rights in the UK. Two of the key objectives set out in the document were to repeal the Human Rights Act and put the text of the convention into primary legislation. Significantly, the document proposed to break the formal link between British courts and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The effect of this would be to treat court judgments as advisory opinions. Instead, the question of which judgments the UK Government would follow and which it would not would be decided by means of some kind of parliamentary process. I might characterise this is as a "pick and mix" approach to court judgments. The document also proposed to limit the use of human rights laws to the most serious cases. No detail was given on what that might mean in practice. We still do not know what the Conservative Party has in mind in this respect.

The document published by the Conservatives also proposed to reduce the reach of cases to the UK. In this case, we have an indication of what they almost certainly mean. They are seeking to address the concerns of the UK Government about being held to account for what the UK armed forces do abroad, for example. Cases have been taken regarding the deployment of troops even though they are ill-equipped to deal with the conflict to which they are being sent, or regarding the behaviour of the armed forces in certain situations. The Conservative Party has also announced its intention to amend the ministerial code, which places a duty on Ministers and civil servants to respect international legal obligations. While this might almost sound prosaic, the idea of amending the ministerial code suggests there is more to this than might at first have seemed the case.

According to the Conservative Party document, it was intended to negotiate these changes through the Council of Europe in the first instance. However, the party was proposing withdrawing from the Council of Europe altogether if it did not prove possible to make such accommodations. One of the difficulties with that approach is the reality that Article 46 of the convention requires all signatories to abide by the judgment of the courts and those judgments are then supervised by the Council of Europe. The party was putting itself on a collision course with the Council of Europe. The reality is that if these proposals are put forward, the chances of them being negotiated with the Council of Europe are somewhere between negligible and nil. Those initial proposals subsequently appeared in the Conservative Party manifesto, albeit without reference to withdrawing from the Council of Europe. More recently, they appeared in the Queen's speech, which repeated the intention to repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a Bill of Rights. On that occasion, it was announced that there would be consultation on the changes. The process of consultation is currently undefined and is without a timetable. My understanding is that the brakes have been applied to this process. The lack of detail reflects considerable unease within Whitehall about the original proposals.

There has been no mention in any of the proposals to date of what this means for the Belfast Agreement. As the members of the joint committee are aware, human rights and equality is one of the foundation stones of the agreement. It underpins the agreement. Annex 1 of the Agreement affirms the commitment to human rights, the intention to incorporate the convention with direct access to the courts and the remedies for breaches of the convention, including the power to overrule Northern Ireland Assembly legislation. At the time the Agreement was signed, the Human Rights Act was in its genesis. The Act came into effect in 2000, but the commitment to implement the human rights agreement was already there in 1998. The Northern Ireland Act subsequently enshrined the requirement of the Assembly to enact legislation which must be compatible with the convention. There are a number of checks and balances within the Northern Ireland Act.