“The past invades the present, The present lives in the past, The future will never come.” The closing words of Robert Greacen’s poem, Procession, lamented the atrophy of unionism in the aftermath of partition. In the last week, the troubled passage of the Special Advisers Bill through the Northern Ireland Assembly and the UK Government’s(…)
‘I’ve got one thing to say to you, my boy … you can’t trust the Irish, they are all liars … and that’s what you have to remember, so just don’t forget it’. Death cannot constrain the effervescent charm of Margaret Thatcher. Or maybe Peter Mandelson, who revealed this gobbet of bile to(…)
The auguries for “Marching Season” in Northern Ireland look bleak. Months of loyalist protests against Belfast City Council’s decision to restrict the flying of the Union Flag are fuelling tensions. Naomi Long, the Alliance MP for East Belfast (who has been at the centre of the storm since her Party backed the current arrangements regarding(…)
Gay rights issues, and particularly issues of equality of treatment for gay people living in the UK have created a flurry of headlines in recent months. In January, two of the conjoined cases Eweida v UK (Ladele v UK and McFarlane v UK) involved clashes between rights to religion (Article 9 ECHR) and equality legislation (now(…)
David Cameron is shocked. Ed Miliband is shocked. But no one is really shocked. Patrick Finucane (pictured left) has been dead for nearly 24 years and the world moves on cruelly fast. Labour’s demand for a full public inquiry into his killing smacks of making political capital out of a family denied answers (let alone(…)
Human rights cases rarely seem to generate media interest unless some populist bogeyman, like Abu Qatada, has successfully scuppered a government policy by running to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In the UK in particular, the confluence of human rights claims by figures such as Qatada, and the distrust of European institutions (irrespective(…)
Last Friday the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court in London decided (in the Mutua case) that three Kenyans could pursue claims for damages against the UK Government for its use of torture during the Kenya Emergency of 1952-1960. In the UK and Ireland today the events in 1950s Kenya, as the colonial authorities(…)
Every four years the world watches, expecting to be wowed by national performances. This summer is no exception, with Great Britain and Northern Ireland facing a weight of expectation to improve upon its 2008 performance (and largely delivering). Unlike the Olympic and Paralympic Games, however, the UN Universal Periodic Review of human rights in the(…)
Julian Assange (pictured left), founder of Wikileaks, friend of open government, enemy of secrecy, and suspected rapist, has hardly been out of the newspapers this week. News that, following the defeat of his legal efforts to resist extradition to Sweden on the basis of a European Arrest Warrant, Assange had sequestered himself in Ecuador’s UK embassy(…)
Last month saw the conclusion of Peter Hain’s (pictured left) legal battles over his autobiography, Outside In, which has provoked considerably more controversy in Northern Ireland’s legal circles than its ranking at 152,187 on Amazon’s bestseller list would suggest. The book charts Hain’s political journey from anti-apartheid activist to Labour cabinet minister, and whilst the(…)
