Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There has been some ill-informed and misinformed criticism of our proposals which has resulted in some individuals and some sections of the media being misled. It was always our intention, as announced, that a group of individuals, clearly independent of Government, would be appointed as a selection panel and they were so appointed. I do not know what other procedure the Deputy is suggesting. We cannot have independent people emerging from the ether and self-appointing themselves. Somebody, at some stage, has to have some accountability for the way we conduct public affairs. A selection panel was selected, whose members, as the Deputy acknowledges, are unimpeachable in their independence. Indeed, the Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality recognised them as being unimpeachable so I cannot work out why the process should be the subject of criticism of any description, other than because there are some individuals who feel compulsively required to criticise everything.

I thank the Deputy for reminding me that we took an initiative. It was our initiative to write to the Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights to seek her advice on the heads of the Bill because of the important role her office has in providing the secretariat to the international co-ordination committee that deals with the accreditation of national human rights institutions. There was some confusion created about the status and contents of her response to a letter which I received. However, I can inform the Deputy that the confusion has now been completely dispelled and we are back on track with the process of selecting members of the new commission, with advertisements to invite applications expected to appear in the next week or two.

Regarding the letter from the Deputy High Commissioner and the paper that accompanied it, my Department provided a very comprehensive paper in response to the points raised and I can also inform the Deputy that a group of officials, led by the Secretary General of my Department, met the Deputy High Commissioner and some of her officials on 8 October in Geneva. This was a very positive meeting. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights considers that we have engaged in a good process in the development of the new commission and has full confidence that the Irish Government is approaching the issue in the right way. The OHCHR hopes that it can continue to use our approach as a best-practice model for other member states. In reply to questions as to whether there were any matters in the Department's paper responding to the OHCHR's observations that struck them as being problematic in the context of the future re-accreditation process or if there were any remaining issues they would have concerns about, the OHCHR said there were none. That answer could not be clearer. Far from potentially causing confusion or inadvertently limiting the powers of the commission, the approach in the heads of the Bill, of having two definitions of human rights, which led to some very uninformed comment, is an approach which the OHCHR says it now regards as a best-practice model and one that other states should be encouraged to adopt.

I thank the Deputy for giving me the opportunity to address this issue because there have been some extraordinarily inaccurate reports published in a number of outlets, and in one obsessively, about this process. We will have an enhanced, independent human rights commission in place, dealing with human rights and equality issues, following a best-practice approach with an appointments system that is superior to that which previously applied to the human rights commission and with a direct relationship between that commission and the Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality, something that does not exist under the current legislation and which did not apply to the outgoing commission.

See this speech in context