APPENDIX 7
Supplementary memorandum submitted by
the Committee on the Administration of Justice
Two issues arose in the discussion which we
felt we may not have done sufficient justice and we are submitting
this short note accordingly.
Firstly, the role of the police. CAJ would endorse
very much the position being put forward by the PSNI that it would
be a retrograde step to return the decision making process around
marches to the police. While Sir George Quigley says that he is
proposing no such thing, it is CAJ's belief that if public safety
considerations are considered subsequent to other rights considerations,
and if the police are seen as the primary decision makers in the
area of public safety (which will undoubtedly become the case),
the general public will assume that the police have the final
decision making authority for or against particular parades. This
would in our view be quite retrograde for a number of reasons.
It places the police back in the invidious position of being "judge,
jury and executioner" as they were before the passage of
the current legislation; it implies that the police have a primary
contribution to make on public safety grounds, but lesser responsibilities
for other human rights obligations which—as a public body
subject to the Human Rights Act—is incorrect; and it places
the police at the heart of a deeply contentious and often highly
politicised debate which is certainly not in the long term interest
of good policing.
Secondly, on the proposal to make an explicit
reference to article 11 of the ECHR in domestic legislation. Apart
from objecting to the parsing of article 112 into distinct elements,
CAJ is opposed to any privileged status being given to article
11 on the face of the legislation. While Democratic Dialogue,
and apparently the NI Human Rights Commission in earlier testimony,
suggested in the hearings that article 11 incorporates all other
relevant rights by virtue of its reference to respecting other
rights, this could as easily be said of articles 8, 9 or 10, all
of which have been called upon by different parties to the dispute.
CAJ believes that it is unhelpful to accept
that there is a conflict of rights and then imply, albeit perhaps
unintentionally, that one right (article 11 and the freedom of
assembly) has more significance than any of the others that people
might rely upon in their arguments with the Parades Commission,
or in subsequent judicial reviews (right to privacy, freedom of
religious belief, freedom of expression etc). Therefore, CAJ would
support mentioning all the relevant ECHR articles (and there are
quite a number), or none of them, though we believe that the latter
option is the more appropriate one. All public bodies are already
bound by the Human Rights Act, and repetition in ordinary legislation
does not necessarily make the rights any more protected.
9 March 2004
|
