Mr. Ed O'Donovan:

To address Deputy Crowe's question on what the committee can do, I think it can continue to highlight the disconnect between Ireland's generally very supportive stance on human rights defenders and the programmes it has in place to provide protection and support to human rights defenders and, as I mentioned, the very apparent fact that the most dangerous sectors for people to work in are the fields of business, mega-projects and extractive industry. At Front Line Defenders, we collect data every year on the number of attacks and people being killed and the vast majority are those working in those sectors. Last year, for instance, we documented more than 300 people being killed, and this year it is going to be a very similar number, if not higher. While on the one hand, as Ms Curran mentioned, Ireland is well known at the UN Human Rights Council and internationally as having this supportive stance on the civil society space and human rights defenders, on the other hand, one of the key causes of diminishing civil society space is the power of unregulated business and the attacks which have a knock-on impact on communities. They exercise a chilling effect. It dissuades more people from getting involved in civil action and in rights defence when their colleagues and family members are being killed, threatened and smeared. Companies are often involved in these smear campaigns. At Front Line Defenders we analyse these types of campaigns and we have data which show that when people are killed, it is very rarely a one-off attack. It often starts with a threat or a smear campaign, and then it escalates when nothing is done about it. This is one of the reasons Front Line Defenders is supportive of greater regulation and a United Nations-binding treaty on business and human rights.