Mr. Mark Kelly:

I return to the Chairman's question, because he zeroed in on the following phrase in our opening statement, as to what are the "negative consequences for the uniformity of human rights standards across these islands"? If this were to happen, it would fundamentally undermine the principle of equivalence which is embedded in the Good Friday Agreement and a situation would be created under which it would be possible for persons to go to court and for their lawyers to argue directly before the courts in this jurisdiction the case law of the European Court of Human Rights but that would no longer potentially be possible in the neighbouring jurisdiction on the island. That effect of that is twofold. It is, first, that one creates a jurisdiction in which the subsidiarity arguability of these Strasbourg standards is no longer directly available to those in the courts. One also then creates a cohort of persons, including a significant number who hold Irish passports and self-identify as Irish living in the neighbouring jurisdiction who would no longer have the same level of protection as those in this jurisdiction do. If one thinks about another outworking of it in terms of the Traveller community here, one would have an indigenous national minority who are travelling on the island who in one part of the island would have a completely different lower level of protection in the neighbouring jurisdiction than they would have here, and that offends against another fundamental principle of international human rights, which is that of non-retrogression. Our colleague, Mr. Les Allamby, in his opening statement, referred to another joint statement, which was made by the three United Kingdom national human rights institutions to the United Nations earlier this year, in which they put it simply. They stated:

our human rights laws must pass a simply test: do they take us forwards or back? We would not support a reversal of the leading global role ... [that] has played in protecting and promoting human rights

in the neighbouring jurisdiction and the other jurisdictions that neighbour us, if this were to go forward. Those are the two principal problems: the creation of unequal playing fields in terms of the protection of human rights and retrogression in terms of the current level of protection.