Mr. Daniel Holder:

Yes, we have looked at that. We provided the mapping exercise to the committee, which goes through all the agreements and the unimplemented commitments. We see the goal ultimately of any future review process - and it may well come in the next endless cycle of renegotiation after the assembly election - as getting what has already been agreed implemented. There are certain areas where we see change to return largely to what was envisaged within the Good Friday Agreement. Primary among these is the removal of the veto that was introduced at St. Andrews over controversial and significant mandates. It turns the intention of the Good Friday Agreement on its head. It is a subjective tool to block rights-based policies and that is what it is used for.

A second issue that we have flagged is the power vested in the First Minister or deputy First Minister unfairly to block items going on the agenda of the Northern Ireland Executive. We have looked at that in detail as well. To give some examples from the current mandate, a submission to the Council of Europe treaty body on the Irish and Ulster Scots strategies was blocked from the Executive agenda and the Irish language strategy does not appear to have been progressed by virtue of being blocked from the agenda. As members may know, the draft budget in December 2020 was blocked for a number of months from the agenda of the Executive. Back in June 2021, the Minister for Communities at the time stated that legislation to close loopholes in the agenda had been blocked by the DUP 17 times. This was at the time the Minister of Health, Mr. Robin Swann, called out that opt-out organ donation legislation was being blocked from the agenda. The Minister of Justice, Ms Naomi Long, also called out that measures around upskirting and strengthening protections for victims of sexual abuse had also been blocked from the agenda. It was only after high-profile public intervention and outrage that those measures were given any sort of passage, albeit the latter was in reduced form.

The huge implications of the St. Andrews veto will come too late. We have a situation where Ministers cannot take any decision that is significant or controversial, which applies to almost any decision at the moment, given that there is no programme for government. If there is a programme for government, it puts the St. Andrews veto beyond its scope. It is obviously a very clever move simply to veto the programme for government. Therefore, the veto can be used on everything else. We end up in a situation whereby the body that is supposed to take the decisions that individual Ministers cannot take on the grounds that they are deemed significant or controversial - meaning Ministers can only take insignificant and uncontroversial decisions - does not exist because that body is the Northern Ireland Executive. It may well not exist after the next Assembly election for some considerable period of time. We could end up with something more than lame-duck Ministers, namely, Ministers who will not be able to progress any of the issues.

We have also looked at other issues as the Equality Coalition. We do not believe the reforms to the petition of concern went far enough. We would like what the majority wanted at the time of New Decade, New Approach, namely, for the human rights and equality commissions to have an adjudicatory role based on rights-based criteria, that is, the European Convention on Human Rights and the bill of rights when the latter is implemented. Things cannot really function until that happens.

The St. Andrews veto in the Executive needs to be knocked out but there also needs to be a broader review of cross-community designations, in particular given the growth to ensure that rights-based power-sharing involves participation across the community. At the moment, it is not based on community background at all but on unionist and nationalist traditional political designations. That is not to say we want to get rid of the system completely. We want a system obviously that prevents abuses of power by larger blocs but we believe that issue needs to be looked at.

A further technical issue is the good relations duty. While it was not in the Good Friday Agreement, it was added on to the equality idea as an appendage. It has been the mechanism used to wreck and block a number of equality policies. It has been heavily criticised by Council of Europe bodies and we believe it needs to be defined to ensure it is actually about tackling prejudice and promoting understanding.

That is rather than just being a veto over what is politically contentious, including some of the matters I raised earlier around housing, whereby it is seen as bad for good relations to put houses in particular areas because it is politically contentious. We are dealing with a case where Belfast City Council, after much campaigning and work, is adopting a much more progressive model for bilingual street signage in line with international standards. Nevertheless, its consultation is proposing an equality screening exercise to look at good relations impacts on each and every bilingual sign proposal. That seems to be code for not putting up such signage where it is politically contentious.

Again, that is not an example of objective, rights-based criteria but rather vesting a veto in the opponents of rights and equality that can block and obstruct things agreed many years ago. The Good Friday Agreement, in such an example, was meant to mark a reset in the relationship between the Irish-speaking community and the state and move away from the predecessor English-only policies. It is ironic some of the mechanisms that were to underpin the Good Friday Agreement have been implemented in the wrong way, such as with the addition of the good relations duty. We are not there yet.

As the Equality Coalition we have a network of over 100 non-governmental organisations and trade unions campaigning on equality issues. We have a series of key policy requests we believe would be helpful to making the institutions function in any way.