A member of the Women's Coalition's multi-party talks team said she was concerned that the Mitchell Principles had survived the talks process to become central in the Belfast Agreement.
Ms Barbara McCabe said at a conference in Dublin that the Belfast Agreement defined democracy as the absence of violence. This was appropriate as it was first coined by Senator George Mitchell when reporting on the International Body's examination of illegal weapons decommissioning. "It is not that I want to dispute the importance of the absence of violence, and it is not that I want to argue that decommissioning should not happen.
"But if violent conflict is the result of dysfunctional politics - and I believe that it is - then getting the politics right should be the central focus."
Ms McCabe was speaking in Dublin at a conference, "Bringing Rights Back Home", which examined the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into Irish law. It was organised by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, (ICCL), and the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) in Northern Ireland in association with The Irish Times. The conference also examined human rights and the Northern Ireland peace process. The European Convention will become part of Northern Ireland's law when incorporated into UK law this year.
She said that while rights, safeguards and equality of opportunity lay at the heart of the Belfast Agreement, they had played little part in the public debate since Good Friday. None of these issues was a debating point during the referendum campaign.
The failure to discuss rights sent a clear, if subliminal, message that there was a hierarchy of issues contained in the agreement and rights and equality issues did not appear to be among them, she said. Debate had focused on decommissioning, prisoners, and how to make the Assembly work in practice. These were the concerns of the bigger parties and reflected the notion that size of mandate determined legitimacy of comment. Smaller parties were allowed to join the debate but only on the basis of an agenda already set.
The lawyer and co-chairman of the ICCL, Mr Michael Farrell, said the Republic could not push for higher standards of human rights protection for Northern Ireland than those enjoyed by its own citizens. The Republic could be the testing ground for some of the new measures and the Commission might find there were human rights abuses in the Republic.
Prof Brice Dickson of the University of Ulster was convinced there would be a Bill of Rights. It was necessary because the Belfast Agreement recognised that the European Convention on Human Rights was inadequate for Northern Ireland, he said. Additional protections were necessary reflecting issues such as parity of esteem. The European convention did not adequately protect economic, social and cultural rights.
There was also a strong political reason to supplement the convention, in order to create a human rights culture. The research and policy officer of the CAJ, Ms Maggie Beirne, said the key human rights issues would be in policing and justice. The agreement was very positive and spoke of the police operating within human rights norms.