Ms Elaine Crory:

Ms Crickard can probably say more than me about the civic forum but I will have a go at the other ones. The petition of concern is a mechanism that was brought in under the St. Andrews Agreement of 2007. It operates a bit like a veto but it has to be signed by a certain number of MLAs. Its purpose is to stop legislation that would have an undue impact on one community or the other. Its intention was to stop something that might have sectarian outcomes. It is used in reality, however, for anything that a Government does not like. There was a vote on same-sex marriage that was passed by a majority of MLAs and a petition of concern was used to stop it. There is no obvious reason why same-sex marriage would have an undue impact one community or the other but it was used that way. There are many other examples but that is an obvious one. Its intention was to prevent discrimination but it is actually being used in the opposite way, that is, to effect discrimination and to frustrate the majority of the MLAs. That is why ended up with same-sex marriage coming through Westminster.

In terms of the bill of rights, on the plus side what we have post Brexit, despite there being very few pluses about Brexit, is that in the Windsor Framework agreement as well as the protocol that preceded that, Article 2 states that citizens in Northern Ireland should not experience a diminution of rights and that we should keep pace with rights in the European Union. The actual operation of that is a different thing, but in reality that has meant our Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission has brought the UK Government to court over a recently passed piece of legislation on migration which is the mechanism they are using to allow them to deport people to Rwanda, or their attempts to do that. The court case has found that does not apply in Northern Ireland because of the Article 2 provisions that ensure there is no diminution of rights. It is being used through the courts to fight legislation coming from the UK and to protect the rights of people within Northern Ireland.

In practice, what that also means is that any legislation coming out of the EU that should apply across all citizens of the EU then have to be incorporated into one or several Government Departments at Stormont. For example, we are getting the pay transparency directive later in the year and that is going to be in some way enacted in Stormont. I say "in some way" as there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. It may be with the Department for the Economy or the Department for Communities, which, for specific but not obvious reasons, is the Department with responsibility for equalities. If it gets split up, it could lose its impact. We have yet to see how that is going to pan out but it is, in theory, our Assembly keeping up with the rights-based provisions of the European Union. That is one plus from all of this.

There was a lot of work done in the last mandate, which ended in the summer of 2022, in respect of a bill of rights. There was an ad hoc committee and they worked quite hard to have what would be a draft bill of rights but it was blocked, mainly by the Democratic Unionist Party, DUP. It was simply seen as something that was a nationalist or other project and, in effect, blocked by unionists. Various unionist political parties do not seem to have bought into the understanding that rights are for everyone and that the bill of rights would protect them and their rights, including their cultural rights, as much as it would protect anybody else. It seems to be one of the many things in Northern Ireland that, for no apparent reason, is politicised along orange and green lines. I do not see us adopting that. Of course, it could be instigated directly from Westminster but I do not see any inclination or interest in doing that at present.

On the civic forum, I think Ms Crickard could say more but I will say recent arguments about reviving it and bringing it back, which there is a legal mechanism to do so that would not require legislation, have been met with complaints that it is too expensive and unrepresentative even though it has not sat since 2002.