Ms Sin?ad Gibney:

I thank the Chairman and wish everyone a good afternoon. I am chief commissioner of IHREC, Ireland's independent national human rights institution and national equality body. I am joined by Ms Kilpatrick and Ms McGahey. When the three of us appear together, I feel like we hit the record for the number of times a person can say the word "commission" in five minutes.

The Belfast Good Friday Agreement is really and truly foundational to the rights and equality framework for the island of Ireland.

The agreement instigated the establishment of the two Northern Ireland commissions, and one of IHREC's legacy bodies, which is the former Irish Human Rights Commission.

The agreement also specified the establishment of a joint committee of the two human rights commissions. That joint committee serves as a forum to discuss and address rights and equality issues that affect the island of Ireland. It took on an additional fervour following the 2016 UK referendum decision as we carried out significant work to identify and address the human rights and equality implications of Brexit. This work saw us engage directly and frequently with parties in London, Brussels, Dublin and Belfast.

Joined now by our colleagues in the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, our three institutions continue this work today in our efforts to oversee and report on the implications of Brexit for rights and equality for everybody on the island. As members will know, the EU-UK withdrawal agreement contains a protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland, which aims to address the unique circumstances on this island in terms of Brexit.

In Article 2, the UK Government commits explicitly to ensuring that no diminution of certain rights, safeguards or equality of opportunity, as set out in the relevant chapter of the Good Friday Agreement, results from its withdrawal from the EU, including in the area of protection against discrimination as enshrined in EU law. Article 2 specifies that this commitment be implemented through dedicated mechanisms. It commits the UK Government to facilitating the work of the two Northern Ireland commissions, as well as the joint committee of IHREC and the NIHRC. Additional statutory powers have been conferred on the two commissions to act as such dedicated mechanisms.

Article 2 also sets all three commissions to work on providing oversight of, and to report on, rights and equality issues that have an island-of-Ireland dimension. To co-ordinate our efforts we have built a framework to govern our Article 2 work and established a joint working group to drive it. Last November, we also met as three full commissions to review and plan our work.

Building on this framework, the focus of the two dedicated mechanism units in the NIHRC and the ECNI is now on understanding and engaging with the very significant issues we are seeing following the UK’s departure from the EU. The rights and equality issues are multiple, as is evident in research by the commissions in areas such as human trafficking and divergence of rights on the island. My colleagues in the two commissions will say more to these concerns.

In addition to parliamentary engagement to raise awareness and understanding of Article 2 and our commissions’ roles therein, which has included regular appearances before the Northern Ireland Assembly Committee for the Executive Office, an appearance before the Seanad Special Select Committee on the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU last year and proactive engagement with North-South civil society. For example, we held a Rights After Brexit event with the Centre for Cross Border Studies in May 2021, and an event in Derry with a focus on minority ethnic groups, migrant people and Border communities in March of this year. These events have been invaluable opportunities for our organisations to connect with civil society, and to learn from the experience of rights holders who are most impacted by Brexit, particularly the communities on both sides of the Border whose day-to-day lives are hugely affected.

Finally, I want to mention our engagement on policy issues. The one I want to highlight here concerns the UK Nationality and Borders Act. As members will know, the Act provides a basis for the UK to introduce an electronic travel authorisation or ETA regime. ETAs would essentially require everyone wishing to travel to the UK, bar British and Irish citizens, to seek permission in advance of travel. This provision would affect a significant number of individuals who do not hold a recognised UK immigration status despite the current system allowing them free travel across the Border to shop, work, access services or visit family. This gives rise to serious equality and rights concerns, about which we jointly wrote to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney, specifically on how ETAs may affect the right to private and family life of people in Border communities; may undermine the protocol commitment to avoiding a hard border, and related checks and controls; and may create the potential for racial profiling to result from associated checks. The potential for racial profiling is particularly concerning given reports of selective passport checks happening on buses that cross the Ireland-Northern Ireland Border. We, in IHREC, have engaged about this matter with the Policing Authority and the Garda Commissioner's office. The Policing Authority has raised this matter in its meetings with the Garda Commissioner.

I have given a quick overview of our framework and a few examples of some of our joint activity, which we will detail in a full joint activity report that we will publish in the coming months. Ms Kilpatrick and Ms McGahey will go into more programmatic detail of the rights and equality issues that they are scoping and addressing.

As I hope members can see, we have a very positive working relationship. Our institutions share a collective commitment to protect and promote rights and equality for everyone on this island. Our joint work is more important now than ever given, for example, the new UK Prime Minister’s stated willingness to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR. The ECHR is an essential part of the Good Friday Agreement. We cannot allow the equality and human rights framework that underpins peace on this island to be a matter of interpretation when it is already set out in an international agreement. It was positive to see the Taoiseach’s early engagement with the new Prime Minister this week in London. Such engagement needs to be sustained and direct with the Prime Minister to ensure that human rights and equality see no diminution and indeed, see protections grow as the UK and Ireland’s continuing relationship post Brexit is forged.