We are pleased to post Dr. Ruth Fletcher’s submission to the Health Committee on the General Scheme of the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Bill, 2013. Ruth is Senior Lecturer in Law and Director of Centre for Law, Ethics and Society at Keele University. She spoke at the final day of the Committee’s hearings on(…)
Irish women are still travelling to England to terminate their pregnancies. Meanwhile, the legal fallout of the Eighth Amendment mounts up. At the inquest into the death of Savita Halappanavar in Galway last week, a senior midwife manager explained how she had come to make the ‘Catholic country’ remark which, in the words of the(…)
Human Rights in Ireland welcomes this guest post from Prof. Brice Dickson and Prof. Colin Harvey , Human Rights Centre, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast. Advice on a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland, submitted to the Secretary of State by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission in 2008, was roundly rejected by the(…)
The European Commission on Racism and Intolerance has released its fourth monitoring cycle report on Ireland, which is available here. Although there are some points upon which Ireland is commended (including the continuing operation of the Equality Tribunal, the establishment and remit of the Press Ombudsman, Press Complaints Commission and National Employment Rights Authority and(…)
It took a long time to get to the McAleese Report ; the report of an independent inquiry set up in response to UNCAT Recommendations in 2011, investigating the extent of State involvement in the Magdalene Laundries regime. The Report finds that: Sean Aylward and others were entirely wrong to claim that the Magdalene Laundries were(…)
The arresting image to the left (see full size) shows inmates of the Gloucester Street Magdalene Laundry in Dublin marching in a Corpus Christi procession in 1960, with the state’s police at their side. The Interdepartmental Committee Report on State involvement with Magdalene Laundries is to be published today, after a long wait. Justice for(…)
The Joint Committee on Health and Children has been holding public hearings on “the Implementation of the Government Decision following the publication of the Expert Group Report into matters relating to A, B, C, vs Ireland”. You can find the Expert Group Report, published in November, here. The transcripts of the public hearings are available(…)
The Department of An Taoiseach has published the overly ambitious legislative agenda for the current Dáil and Seanad session. The Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill 2010 will (hopefully!) be heading to Committee Stage this term. The 2010 Immigration Bill has been around in essence since 2006, and will unlikely be coming into force for some(…)
Last week I wrote this blog-post, which was re-published in substantially shortened form here. I’ve been asked a few times now, especially in the comments to the Irish Times piece what I meant by the phrase “respectful, informed judicial engagement with the nuances of cultural justification”. I’ve been quite taken aback by what most of(…)
In an op-ed in the ‘Rite and Reason’ section of last week’s Irish Times, Dr. Kenneth Houston lauded a regional German court for ‘standing up unambiguously against’ male circumcision on behalf of ‘secular liberal values and ideas of religious freedom’. The Cologne case is in danger of becoming another data point in the ‘law vs culture’ debates.(…)
