Ms Alyson Kilpatrick:

I did not want to miss the opportunity to make two brief comments. It is really important in the context of this discussion to remember that the Joint Committee on Human Rights is a very different base from the dedicated mechanism in which the three commissions work together. The joint committee goes way beyond the dedicated mechanism in the protocol. Bearing in mind that we were talking about legacy earlier, that might be a good example to use. Potentially, if the legacy Bill is successful, a person in Northern Ireland – say, a relative of somebody murdered in Northern Ireland – will not have a right to take a judicial review or make a civil claim in the courts in Northern Ireland. However, somebody whose loved one was murdered in Dundalk will have the right.

I do not need to tell any of the members about the cross-Border nature of some of the violence and the different identities of different actors moving back and forth across the island. You admittedly have a very different framework of rights in substance. Even if we were all signatories to the convention enforcing those rights, enforcing them in Dundalk would be very different from enforcing them anywhere in Northern Ireland. That is a real worry for the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. Given that the stated intention of the Bill is to make sure that, for example, veterans are not inconvenienced by the state's Article 2 obligations, it suggests to me that the rights will be diminished this side rather than the other. I do not know what to do about it, but it must be recognised how serious that is.