Professor Colin Harvey:

Regarding the winners and losers, it is a good point just to underline the sense in which the Good Friday Agreement obligations that we are talking about will benefit everyone who is affected. Sometimes that gets lost in the conversation around the agreement. Second, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission - I declare an interest in that I was on the commission at the time we submitted the advice to the British Government in 2008 - spotted a lot of this in 2008. What we noticed was that a lot of the core concepts in the agreement, particularly those around parity of esteem, mutual respect, and equality of treatment, were not reflected in domestic law. We proposed, as part of a comprehensive set of proposals on human rights, a bill of rights that included those things. I think we feel that absence, and it is part of the wider implementation gap that needs to be addressed. It is also part of the reason I think we have the problems we do at the moment in the North.