Dr. Mary Rogan:

I thank Deputy McFadden for her question, which I think feeds into the response Ms Power has given as well, namely, the idea that one would take a preventive approach to human rights. The Deputy asked what the alternative might have been in the Foy case. Perhaps when a case such as that one comes onto somebody’s desk, it could be viewed as an opportunity for learning and looking at what other places are doing and seeing whether we could respond to it in a different way rather than throwing defensive legal resources at it.

In the case of rights proofing and regulatory impact analysis, that is really about when legislation is being proposed, that allied to that there would be some sort of analysis or assessment done where human rights might be impacted. One can think of a whole variety of areas in which this would be relevant. The Legal Services Bill might be one of them. Other obvious areas could include prison conditions or penal reform, which is my area of interest. If one makes a change to legislation, tied to that, one would have an assessment done, perhaps by the Department of Justice and Equality or elsewhere, which would set out the implications for human rights of the particular legislation. The analysis would be quite specific, not just a broad based view of what human rights entails but now it would affect individual rights. It would be done as part of a pre-legislative scrutiny kind of process.