Professor Colin Harvey:

I will try to pick out a number of the questions and go through them.

The answer to the question about human rights equality is that when we talk about the unique circumstances of this island and the Good Friday Agreement, we have to recognise that human rights and equality are central to the Good Friday Agreement. That means that sometimes we are not just having a conversation about citizens but about human beings on this island. It goes back to the question about immigration control. If this becomes a conversation about British citizens and Irish citizens only, we forget some of the people on the island who may suffer most as a result of some of things we are discussing, including immigration control and immigration laws and policies that are coming out of Westminster that are frankly horrendous and appalling. A big question for Ireland and the Irish Government is whether it will be led by an increasingly repressive and restrictive approach to immigration coming from the British Government and the Westminster Parliament given that Brexit was majored on migration control. This is a big issue of principle for the Irish Government and people on this island, whether we want to start thinking differently and start a new conversation about how we engage, North and South, with the rest of the world, or whether we want to keep following what is at times an appalling approach to immigration and refugee and asylum policy coming from Westminster.

On equivalence, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission produces an annual statement on human rights in Northern Ireland. Why not have an annual statement about how we are doing on the island? I often have a sense that we do not talk to each other enough. We talk a lot about all-island co-operation but we do not talk to each other enough. There could be an annual statement from a reimagined joint committee dealing with how we are getting on, North and South, in human rights and equality and showing where there have been advances here and there, and this would inform the conversation. To push that a bit further, in terms of participating and engaging in the wider EU conversation, is there a way to link this reimagined joint committee to the European Fundamental Rights Agency to ensure, for example, that people in Northern Ireland are not left out of the conversation about where the EU is going? There are things like that and we need to start that conversation. I cannot see how having an annual equivalence statement and audit to see how we are performing on human rights and equality on this island to inform the conversation would threaten anyone. I myself would find that incredibly helpful as a document.

On international supervision, it is no secret that that the UK Government is not particularly enamoured of the Strasbourg court, the European Court of Human Rights, nor is it especially enamoured of the Court of Justice of the European Union. In the case of Northern Ireland, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has been very important in the development of jurisprudence under the European convention system. International supervisory mechanisms are absolutely essential. It is important for us all to have that international human rights oversight. It is important for the European Convention on Human Rights to have that international Strasbourg court there and it has been important for human rights in Northern Ireland. I hope it continues long into the future. It has played an important role.

How many times have we referred to the Good Friday Agreement this afternoon? We keep talking about it, but some of the biggest debates that are taking place on the island are among those who feel it has not been implemented. There are still parts of it that are a work in progress. The debates continue on the puzzle, the jigsaw or whatever analogy one wishes to use. For those who say it has been underenforced, the logical next step is to ask what can be done about that. On the issue of there possibly being a breach of the Good Friday Agreement, one of the things we are discovering which should shape the Irish Government's approach in the time ahead and why there is an onus or responsibility is that more legal hard work - I put it as strongly as this - needed to be done on tying down legal aspects of that Agreement. Looking at the British-Irish Agreement, which is the international agreement between the UK and Ireland, it is very light on enforcement. What does the Irish Government do if it believes the British Government is in breach of the Good Friday Agreement? Not very much in terms of legal enforcement, it would seem. That is a big problem.

We found the same question last year in terms of litigation around Brexit. Many of us, including myself, working in Belfast, teaching constitutional law, thought that something legally significant happened in 1998. The UK became a more constitutionally and legally pluralist place. There was devolution in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and the old, traditional UK model was passing away. We found out last year that was not the case. The Westminster Parliament remains supreme, very much working from the centre with a command and control model, and that constitutionally and legally pluralist understanding that we all thought we had fell apart. That is a big problem. In any negotiations wherever they happen, whether at EU level, power-sharing in Northern Ireland or whatever, much harder thought must be given to putting the principles that we have been talking about this afternoon on a firmer legal footing so that we are not left in a position where we see that this seems to be being breached but we do not seem to able to do anything about it. That is urgent.

To put it more melodramatically, there are only so many times with Good Friday Agreement where it is possible to say that one of the participants has left the building. There have been moments over recent years that the British Government has simply left the building in terms of the Good Friday Agreement principles. If nothing can be done about that, that is a big problem and for the Irish Government in particular. That needs to be addressed urgently. From the perspective of an academic lawyer, with all the flaws that they have, there must be more thought given to law.