Abstract
One of the most significant characteristics of the peace process in Northern Ireland has been the profound importance attached by a range of academic, political and non-governmental actors to the concept of human rights. However, unionists, more so than other elite-level political actors in Northern Ireland, have expressed scepticism about proposals from the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) for a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights. This article explores how unionists relied on a ‘court sceptic’ narrative to argue against the Bill of Rights proposals. It argues that at one level unionist reliance on ‘court sceptic’ arguments can be conceived of as instrumental in the sense that it was a mere tactical response to, as unionists argue, the inflation by the NIHRC of their mandate contained in the Good Friday Agreement to devise a Bill of Rights. However, at another level unionists reliance on ‘court sceptic’ arguments can also be traced to their constitutional experience within the British polity.
Highlights
One of the most significant characteristics of the peace process in Northern Ireland has been the profound importance attached by a range of academic, political and non-governmental actors to the concept of human rights
The purpose of this article is to explore how unionist political representatives increasingly relied on a ‘court sceptic’ narrative to articulate a case against the proposals from the Northern Ireland Bill of Rights Forum (NIBoRF) (2008) and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) (2001, 2004 and 2008)
This article has sought to explore how post-Agreement unionist discourses about a Bill of Rights came to rely increasingly on what has been described as a ‘court sceptic’ narrative
Summary
One of the most significant characteristics of the peace process in Northern Ireland has been the profound importance attached by a range of academic, political and non-governmental actors to the concept of human rights. As one scholar puts it, ‘moved from the margins to the mainstream’ (Harvey 2001, 342) of political life in Northern Ireland and in so doing have become a dominant characteristic of contemporary political discourse there (Mageean and O'Brien 1999; Kavanagh 2004). The pervasiveness of human rights discourse in both the practical circumstances of the body politic in Northern Ireland and in theoretical reflections about the nature of the conflict there is in many ways a reflection of the fact that we live in what one scholar has called the ‘age of rights’ (Bobbio 1996). In Northern Ireland the new rights culture has found strong support within three key sections of society: first, within scholarly circles— among a particular group of Northern Ireland-based legal academics who argue that the post-conflict circumstances of Northern Ireland and the constitutional, legal and political change that has occurred there are more appropriately explained, analysed and reflected upon using analytical frameworks offered by transitional justice discourse (Bell 2003; Campbell et al 2003; Bell et al 2004; Campbell and Ni Aolain 2005; McEvoy 2007); second, by Irish nationalist and Irish republican political parties in Northern Ireland (SDLP and Sinn Fein) which have a long tradition of expressing political preferences and positions during the conflict in Northern Ireland using the language of human rights; and third, by human rights activists in non-governmental organisations such as the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) who have long argued for a ‘rights-based’ solution to the seemingly intractable problem of the conflict in Northern Ireland (Mageean and O'Brien 1999)
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