Northern Ireland Dimensions to the First Decade of the United Kingdom Supreme Court

This article focuses on the relationship between the United Kingdom Supreme Court and Northern Ireland over the course of a constitutionally significant period of time, namely the first decade of the Court's existence. It does this by exploring what difference the Court has made to the law of Northern Ireland, what significance the cases from Northern Ireland have had for the law in other parts of the United Kingdom, and what part has been played in the Court's work by the sole Justice from Northern Ireland, Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore, and by the Attorney General for Northern Ireland, John Larkin QC. It concludes that the Court has established itself as an indispensable component of the legal system of Northern Ireland.     

Northern Irish legal education after Brexit

ABSTRACT

In this article we argue that the impact of Brexit on the law schools in Northern Ireland is tied to the “unique circumstances” of legal education in this part of the world. Legal education in Northern Ireland is likely to develop to become even more distinctive than that in other parts of the UK. Although there are two distinct jurisdictions on the island, they are deeply entangled by shared history and geographical proximity that make cross-border practice a daily reality. These circumstances seem likely to drive the trajectory of the development of legal education in Northern Ireland. Indeed, EU law is likely to remain a component of the Northern Irish qualifying law degree. The potential for the development of law specific to Northern Ireland under backstop arrangements is another significant driver for the future orientation of legal education in this jurisdiction. Legal education in Northern Ireland is, therefore, likely to become noticeably more “European” than that in other parts of the UK.     

Sex offender (re)integration into the community: realities and challenges

Abstract

This paper explores the benefits of engaging with self-defined communities in Northern Ireland on the issue of sexual offending and argues the case for building on existing community structures, by identifying people with leadership skills and by empowering them with the knowledge, and with connections to statutory services, that will support public protection. We address the historical context in terms of the impact of the conflict on these communities and describe the role and experience of NIACRO working in Northern Ireland, in particular its Base2 project supporting people under threat. We reference the development of current statutory arrangements for Public Protection Arrangements for Northern Ireland (PPANI) and argue the case for preparing people in the community to receive and understand the messages promoted through PPANI on the basis of our belief that public education is most effective when the people receiving it are receptive.     

Abortion in Northern Ireland: Has the Rubicon Been Crossed?

On 7 June 2018, the Supreme Court delivered their long anticipated ruling on whether the abortion laws in Northern Ireland are compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Although the case was dismissed on procedural grounds, a majority of the court held that, obiter, the current Northern Irish law was incompatible with the right to respect for private and family life, protected by Article 8 ECHR, “insofar as it prohibits abortion in cases of rape, incest and fatal foetal abnormality”. This Supreme Court decision, seen alongside the May 2018 Irish referendum liberalising abortion, and the 5 June 2018 Parliamentary debate seeking to liberalise abortion laws in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, places renewed focus upon the abortion laws of Northern Ireland and Great Britain, which suggests that the ‘halfway house’ of the Abortion Act 1967 Act finally be close to being reformed to hand the decision of abortion to women themselves.     

School exclusions: Lessons from Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland there are many fewer permanent exclusion from school than in England and Wales. It has been suggested that this may be linked to differences in the statutory schemes which regulate exclusion. This article compares the legal framework for school exclusions in Northern Ireland and England and Wales; provides a comparative analysis of the statistical data in relation to school exclusions; assesses whether the differences in the legal framework may have an impact on the propensity to permanently exclude; and considers whether there are any other non-legal factors which may explain lower rates of school exclusions. The overall objective is to see whether the legal differences which exist have a meaningful effect on the overall rate of school exclusion and to extrapolate best practice. In particular, the analysis focuses on experience of the statutory pre-expulsion consultation procedure in Northern Ireland, which has no equivalent in England and Wales.     

Standing and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission

On 7 June 2018, the UK Supreme Court held that the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) did not have standing under the Northern Ireland Act 1998 (NIA) and Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) to challenge the legality of abortion law in Northern Ireland. This case note argues that while a literal reading of the NIA exposes its inconsistencies, a purposive reading of both the NIA and HRA indicates that the NIHRC should have had standing. The note seeks to highlight the unique democratic function of the NIHRC in a consociational setting in protecting rights that are not represented along ethno‐national lines. It also considers the negative ramifications that the judgment will have on women who have been victims of the legislative regime and seek to challenge the compatibility of Northern Irish abortion law with the HRA in the future.     

UK Abortion Law: Reform Proposals,Private Members’ Bills,Devolution and the Role of the Courts

UK abortion law remains unsettled, and subject to on‐going controversy and reform. This article offers a comprehensive critique of all reforms implemented or proposed since 2016. It examines reforms proposed in both Houses of Parliament and contextualises them within a public law analysis, showing both that the complex parliamentary processes relating to Private Members’ Bills have frustrated reform attempts, and that these attempts have been contradictory in their aims between the two Houses. Secondly, it examines the unique positions of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to show the extent to which devolutionary settlements have influenced both reforms and executive involvement. Finally, it examines the potential impact of the courts on abortion law following Re Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission's Application for Judicial Review, showing that the Supreme Court's reframing of the debate in human rights terms is likely to affect abortion law, not only in Northern Ireland, but in the whole of the UK.     

Problems in the pathways to judicial success: women in the legal profession in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

This paper considers women’s representation in the under-explored context of the judiciary in Northern Ireland. Previous research into the experiences of women practitioners in the legal profession in Northern Ireland has indicated that women are discouraged from pursuing judicial careers for a variety of reasons associated with their gender. Further research into the gendered barriers these women practitioners face is required in order to assess the extent to which the same may impede their career progression. This paper uses a critical, social constructionist feminist approach to explore some of the gendered barriers influencing women’s under-representation in Northern Ireland’s judiciary. It is contended that representation can only be improved when women’s retention and progression through the ranks of the legal profession is addressed. Employing gender as a lens, this paper will analyse potential difficulties faced by the women solicitors and barristers in Northern Ireland in order to assess future judicial gender parity prospects in this jurisdiction as it is these women solicitors and barristers who form the female “talent pool” from which future members of the judiciary will be selected.     

Patterns of Policing and Policing Patten

In September 1999 the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland, chaired by Chris Patten, published its recommendations. This article examines the political context of policing reform, the contents of the report and the rejection of its core ideas in the Police (Northern Ireland) Bill published in May 2000. The central argument of the paper is that the Commission's radical model of policing – a network of regulating mechanisms in which policing becomes everyone's business – failed, because it gave insufficient attention, like much modern writing on policing, to the role of the state and the vested interests within policing. The overall outcome is that the Patten Commission has been effectively policed and Northern Ireland will be left with a traditional, largely undemocratic and unaccountable model of policing with most of the control resting with the Secretary of State and the Chief Constable.     

Architecture and Terrorism: A Case Study of the Impact of “The Troubles” on the Architecture of Northern Ireland

Twenty years ago last month “the troubles” began in Northern Ireland. The political, social and economic implications of the problems that now beset the province are well known. What is less familiar is the effect the troubles are having on architecture and environmental design in Northern Ireland. This paper seeks to examine the way the special demands of security and solidity of construction are reconciled with the political policy of playing down the visual impact of the troubles.     

Towards a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights

The political settlement resulting from the Belfast Agreement recognisedthe fundamental importance of the issue of rights to a stable peace inNorthern Ireland. Indeed, the agreement provided for a Human RightsCommission, one of whose tasks is the drafting of a Bill of Rights thatwill reflect the political reality of the province. This paper arguesthat the proposed document will have to reflect an understanding ofrights and their protection resulting from the particular history ofNorthern Ireland. This specific understanding of rights appeared firstin the Anglo-Irish Agreement and has been gradually developed andconsolidated in the political agreements since. The planned NorthernIreland Bill of Rights will have to reflect this rights thinking. Thearticle also chronicles the recent work of the Northern Ireland HumanRights Commission in drafting the Bill of Rights to be presented to theSecretary of State for Northern Ireland in February 2002. Thereciprocal, if belated, moves in the Republic to set up its own humanrights commission will also be addressed as part of the process to drawup a Charter of Rights for the whole people of Ireland.     

Ethno-National Narratives of Human Rights: The Northern Ireland Policing Board

Policing in Northern Ireland has undergone one of the world's most extensive human rights reform programmes. The challenge has been whether the human rights paradigm can serve as a mutual basis for the region's sparring ethno-national communities to deliberate over long-contested issues of policing, accountability and justice. This article focuses on the Northern Ireland Policing Board as an arena to examine the contemporary political attitudes and agendas that animate the Board's statutory duty to monitor policing on the basis of human rights. Marshalling qualitative data and drawing on legal anthropology, this article offers an account of the ‘social life’ of human rights and policing in the context of Northern Ireland's imperfect peace. It argues that, irrespective of legal standards, human rights oversight harbours deep sentiments and concerns, at the heart of which are communities’ own historical engagements with rights, competing legacies of the conflict and divergent understandings of contemporary policing.     

‘Done to death by father or relatives’: Irish families and infanticide cases, 1922–1950

In February 1929 the Bishop of Ossory commented on the fact that in Ireland illegitimate infants were often ‘done to death by father or relatives’ (Irish Catholic, 16 February 1929). There were many instances where family members of unmarried women who gave birth were the sole defendants or co-defendants in infanticide cases in post-independent Ireland. Although illegitimate infants were ‘done to death’ by their fathers in a number of cases that were tried at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin between 1922 and 1950, this article will focus on cases where infants were murdered or suspected of having been murdered by relatives of the birth mother both in the Twenty-Six Counties and in Northern Ireland (Irish Catholic, 16 February 1929). For the purposes of this article I have referred to the murder of illegitimate infants as ‘infanticide’ even though there was no separate charge of infanticide in the Irish Free State until 1949. The English infanticide acts of 1922 and 1938 also applied to Northern Ireland. This article discusses the motives of the relatives of single mothers who played a part in the deaths of illegitimate infants. Unmarried motherhood was severely frowned upon in Ireland and the relatives of single pregnant women assisted their female kin in destroying the evidence of extra-marital conception in order to protect the family's honour and moral reputation in the wider community. The records of infanticide trials provide a great deal of insight into the ways in which mainly working-class families dealt with the strain of pregnancy outside wedlock in Ireland between 1922 and 1950.     

A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand: Evaluating Police Perception of UK Missing Person Definition

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research - This study empirically analyses the definition of a ‘missing person’ for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which is part of a wider...     

Theory vs reality: partisanship and Northern Ireland's Public Accounts Committee 2011–2016

Public accounts committees (PACs) are tasked with scrutinising executive use of public money, undertaking inquiries with the support of the legislative auditor. Through several means, an expectation is placed on members to be politically neutral in undertaking committee work. However, in the context of Northern Ireland, where consociationalism entrenches binary ethno-national identities throughout the political institutions, it would be expected that party-political interests would prevail and fracture the committee. This paper analyses Northern Ireland's PAC from three perspectives alongside qualitative data from interviews with committee members: theory, party-partisanship and changes in the committee's working relationship with the legislative auditor. It is argued that over the 2011–2016 mandate, this PAC coalesced and functioned well as a unit despite expectation to the contrary, and that the changing dynamics of its working relationship with the Northern Ireland Audit Office over this time are testament to its development in this way.     

Women,the Home and Resistance in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This paper provides a perspective on women's resistance in Northern Ireland by focussing on their experiences of house raids. In light of a growing literature on women in conflict with the state, it argues that women have become increasingly politicised and organised in their resistance to repeated incursions into the home by the security forces which have ruptured traditional boundaries around relations of motherhood, home maker and sexual privacy. Based on a qualitative study of one hundred women in Northern Ireland, this paper suggests the coercive agents of the state have played a significant role in both the individual and collective resistance of women. Paradoxically, it seems, the security forces have become agents of change whereby the exposition and violation of the home has been one of the forces which has nurtured and defined women's political consciousness.     

The Frontiers of Legal Analysis: Reframing the Transition in Northern Ireland

British constitutional legal discourse is structurally limited in its capacity to capture the complexity of the Good Friday Agreement. Rather than assessing the Agreement in narrow devolutionary terms, it should be seen as a hybrid domestic and international law instrument, making an important contribution to accepted international law norms in relation to self-determination. The Agreement transforms and partly transcends the Northern Ireland conflict by substituting political contestation for violent conflict, and by defining the modalities of conducting that contestation. This analysis complements classical international law perspectives, and opens up the application of legal discourses associated with 'transitional justice' to the legal and political transformation in Northern Ireland. These discourses focus on the problem of reconciling the demands of peace with the imperatives of justice. The Agreement sits squarely in this terrain with its provisions on 'dealing with the past' and 'institutional legacies'. The insights gained here challenge orthodox thinking about conflict-management and the ongoing political process.     

Procedural Innovation and the Surreptitious Creation of Judicial Supremacy in the United Kingdom

In Re an Application by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission for Judicial Review, the Supreme Court made unfavourable comments about Northern Irish abortion legislation in a way which showed complete disregard for elements of civil procedure which are a foundation of proper adjudication within the context of respect for democracy. This was but the latest of a number of cases in which the senior judiciary has made unaccountable procedural innovations furthering judicial supremacy in defiance of the sovereignty of Parliament. In addition to Re Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, two other of these cases, Simmons v. Castle and R (Miller and another) v. The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, will be discussed. These cases reveal an effort to create judicial supremacy by means which we are obliged to call surreptitious.     

Don't Mention the War: The Court of Appeal,the Criminal Cases Review Commission and Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland

Despite the vast transitional justice scholarship relating to prisoner release, amnesties and prosecutions when conflicts end, there is a significant gap in practice and academic literature regarding wrongful convictions. Uniquely amongst post‐conflict societies, Northern Ireland has a body for investigating miscarriages of justice, albeit one designed for ‘ordinary’ appeals. In the absence of a formal truth‐recovery process, criminal appeals are becoming a proxy for addressing the role of the state during ‘The Troubles,’ as well as remedying individual injustices. This article examines the approach of the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal during the conflict. It charts the developments in its decision‐making following the cease‐fires and the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. It concludes that the current system is unsatisfactory as it ignores the effects of the conflict on the appeal process and offers no insights into the role of the Court during the conflict. Alternative models are suggested.     

Governance, accountability and neighbourhood policing in Northern Ireland: analysing the role of public meetings

In Northern Ireland??s move from conflict to peace, policing has remained close to the top of the political agenda. As part of the peace process, the Independent Commission on Policing (ICP) reported in 1999, and since its publication policing structures in Northern Ireland have undergone considerable reform. One of the threads of the ICP was to introduce a more nodal or networked approach to the delivery of policing that included the establishment of partnership policing structures. Against this backdrop, this article evaluates the use of the recently established Partners and Communities Together (PACT) public meetings in their role as a tool in re-shaping the parameters police accountability in Northern Ireland. The model is explicitly promoted as fostering a more nodal approach to local police decision making by engaging with a more diverse range of groups and harnessing the knowledge of local agencies to solve crime and disorder problems. Therefore, enhancing the accountability and legitimacy of the PSNI at the local level. In these contexts, the article utilises data taken from fieldwork undertaken at these public meetings and critically considers their role as forums where communities bring low level disorder issues that are affecting their neighbourhood to the attention of the PSNI, and whether they help solve these issues in partnership. The article therefore offers an examination of the role of public meetings and the PACT model itself.