Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I can give the Deputy that assurance. This would not operate to make someone liable to be prosecuted in breach of the terms of the convention, in other words, on a charge and a law which was trumped up afterwards to cover something that was in breach of that. There are many different complications to that principle. If, for instance, a state decides to extend its jurisdiction to deal with extra-territorial matters, it is not as clear-cut as that. If Ireland were to say that, under a genocide convention, it would either prosecute people in Ireland or send them away and in prosecuting them in Ireland it assumed jurisdiction to try them on a crime against humanity wherever in the world it happened, that would be a complexity which might or might not be affected by all this.

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