Mr. Liam Herrick:

I will address three of the questions very briefly. Senator McDowell asked a question about the Charter of Fundamental Rights and how it might be interpreted or applied into the future. This was a subject of consideration of the Joint Committee on Human Rights in Westminster. I think it published a report in December, and this was its main topic of examination. Two themes came through in its conclusions. The first was we must bear in mind the structure of the United Kingdom's constitution when we consider the application of quasi-constitutional human rights principles and the capacity or status those principles are likely to have under United Kingdom law into the future. The second point is one which has come up a number of times this afternoon. Whatever about the legal possibilities of enforcing law that currently stands, it is very hard to see how the United Kingdom will be able to reflect the developing jurisprudence of the Charter of Fundamental Rights within its legal system as it becomes severed from the centre.

The second question is that which Senator Higgins raised about the audit of rights. We have been talking about this in a somewhat simple way this afternoon, but the topic received some examination at the recent all-Ireland civic dialogue hosted recently by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Government deserve great credit for the prominence they gave to examination and a very deep probing of these human rights issues in their civic dialogue. However, I think the conclusion of the experts who participated in it was the sheer scale of what will be involved and the committee might have got some sense of that this afternoon. There are the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns about the possible extent of human rights implications of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union and the scale of the auditing task and a complete uncertainty as to who would have the capacity or the competence to carry out that task of auditing. It is clearly incumbent on both Governments to step up and begin this process but it is not at all clear what time or resources would be required even to conduct the identification of the wide range of rights issues involved in areas such as child protection, policing co-operation and so on, all of which give rise to human rights issues.

Third, there is the question of the Human Rights Act. Senator Higgins raised the question of how domestic enforcement of the European Convention on Human Rights might compare with the Strasbourg mechanism of enforcement in the scenario in which the United Kingdom withdraws from the Council of Europe or the European Convention on Human Rights or repeals the Human Rights Act. I cannot emphasise strongly enough the extent to which the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Convention on Human Rights and what this would precipitate, which we can assume would be its withdrawal from the Council of Europe, would be a disaster for the protection of human rights across the Council of Europe area as a whole. I refer to a core nation, a member state of the Council of Europe and a country that was a founder of the human rights mechanisms within the Council of Europe, withdrawing from these bodies and the effect this would have on the wider European discussion about human rights at a very sensitive and fragile moment. Ireland cannot afford to be a bystander to this, not just in respect of its impact on us on this island but also with regard to the very positive role Ireland has always played in supporting the institutions of the Council of Europe. This goes back to Senator McDowell's questions about the Bill of Rights. I am deeply sceptical, as indeed are our colleagues, Liberty in the United Kingdom, about the potential or the intent that the bill of rights would really reflect equivalence with the existing protection of rights under the Human Rights Act. I do not think we can at all assume that the intention or the likelihood is that it would have that equivalence. Even if it were to do so, it would still have the effect of isolating Britain from wider European human rights protections, which can only be seen as damaging to Europe as a whole.