The head of the new Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission has said the d'Hondt system of choosing governments, as pioneered in the North, "may yet find its way into international human rights law".
Prof Brice Dickson was addressing a human rights seminar organised by Ms Mary Banotti MEP in Dublin yesterday. He said there was a lot of talk internationally about how novel and groundbreaking the Belfast Agreement was, an experiment in "consociation with bits of federalism and confederalism thrown in".
Prof Dickson said the commission would be a "people's commission, getting out and about throughout Northern Ireland, producing materials for use in schools, youth groups and community groups, and having a highly accessible office in the centre of Belfast".
It will look at how the Opsahl Commission had gathered people's views and at the successful human rights policies of countries such as South Africa. One "serious disadvantage" is that the commission will not be able to require people to give evidence to it, but Prof Dickson said it would continue to lobby for this power.
The commission will advise the Northern Ireland Assembly on its draft Bills. It has the power to go to court once legislation has been passed to argue that it is incompatible with international human rights standards other than the European Convention on Human Rights, and therefore should be invalidated. From June it will be able to support individuals taking human rights cases to court.
Noting the establishment of a single unified Equality Commission in the North to oversee the equality schemes which every public authority will have to draw up, Prof Dickson said it was "about time that ageism and discrimination based on sexual orientation were tackled". But he noted that individual victims of such abuses would still not be able to claim compensation.
The commission will have a joint committee with the proposed human rights commission in the Republic, yet to be set up, to work on "a common set of human rights standards throughout Ireland".
It will be able to investigate past abuses, although its limited powers to call witnesses will restrict its remit in this area.
It will also be able to investigate victims' rights, and could act, for example, for innocent people killed by paramilitary organisations. It will not be able to enforce its views except by taking court cases, however.
One of its tasks, said Prof Dickson, would be to find the "difficult balance, the necessary compromise" between competing rights such as the right to march and the right not to be intimidated.
He stressed that it would be founded on the wide range of international human rights standards affirmed by the UN and the Council of Europe.