The establishment of a Human Rights Commission in Northern Ireland will lead to a new challenge for the legal profession, a weekend conference on the rights provisions of the Belfast Agreement was told.
The conference, entitled "New Frameworks for Human Rights", was organised jointly by the Committee on the Administration of Justice and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. Last month the CAJ was awarded the seventh European Human Rights Prize by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.
As the Northern Ireland Bill faces its second reading in the House of Lords today, Prof Brice Dickson of the University of Ulster told the conference that the British government still intended to bring in many amendments which had yet to be revealed.
The Human Rights Bill, which would incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into Northern Ireland's domestic law under the agreement, would borrow from other international documents. Human rights groups would be expected to contribute to the Bill, although other groups should contribute also in what Prof Dickson sees as an empowering process.
The powers of the Human Rights Commission to be set up under the terms of the Belfast Agreement reflected the agreement but were too limited, and Prof Dickson called for more powers to be given to it.
He described the current provisions as "minimum standards" and pointed out that the Commission would not, for example, be able to investigate alleged human rights abuses. The Assembly should be obliged to put draft laws before the Commission, he argued, not just intervene at its discretion.
In his outline of the new arrangements, the legal studies professor remarked that in the case of disparity between the agreement and the Bill, there were no mechanisms which could be used to challenge the government for any potential failure to fully implement the agreement.
In the case of the Equality Commission, a new umbrella group for groups currently investigating discrimination, Prof Dickson said public acceptance still had to be won.
Positive recommendations were made by Sir Kenneth Bloomfield's report on victims, but a review of current compensation procedures was very necessary, he argued.
This had been one of the most emotive subjects in the North since it emerged that compensation for victims was often only a fraction of that allocated to the rehabilitation of terrorist prisoners.
However, others at the conference were less happy with the Bloomfield report, with one delegate asking why no mention was made of victims of alleged state terrorism.
Prof Dickson challenged the assembly of lawyers, judges, civil servants and human rights activists to become familiar with Strasbourg jurisprudence. In a speech on the effectiveness of the Irish Constitution earlier in the day, Mr Justice Barrington said there was "a new respect for the crank and the busybody". He argued that in the field of human rights the United Kingdom and Ireland were "moving in the same direction". Harmonisation was evident in such things as the new power of Northern judges to overrule Assembly legislation, as laid out in the agreement.
In the past, judges in the Republic were almost surprised, he said, when they realised they had the power to set aside Acts of parliament.
Mr Martin O'Brien, director of the CAJ, welcomed the fact that Northern judges would be able to "strike down" Assembly legislation.
While the agreement had strong language and a number of mechanisms to protect human rights, the task ahead, he said, was to translate this into reality.
Mr Michael Farrell, co-chairperson of the ICCL, said that even though the agreement was there and the legislation was going through, results would be delivered only if the human rights community made the mechanisms work.
"The legislation is minimalist. We would like to see the legislation much improved. We are concerned that the British Human Rights Commission doesn't have enough powers and there has been no debate about the one in the South at all.
"The human rights community has to continue to campaign to strengthen the powers of the new institutions and then make them work once they are in place, because paper protection is no good unless flesh is put on it," he said.