5th Annual Conference
Human Rights and Criminal Justice
13 October 2007
The Criminal Justice Act 2007 came under heavy criticism from numerous parties yesterday at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Irish Human Rights Commission and the Law Society of Ireland. At the conference, entitled Human Rights and Criminal Justice, the Act was criticised for both the manner in which it was passed by the Oireachtas and in terms of the provisions that it contained.
James MacGuill, Senior Vice President of the Law Society, described the Act as a, ‘draconian and obscene element of legislation’, and vowed that his organisation would continue to highlight attacks on civil liberties posed by the Act.
While the delegates acknowledged that violent, gangland drug-related crime is a serious cause for concern in this country, they argued for a calm, focussed approach in countering the crime problem, rather than, ‘soundbite solutions’, in the words of Dr Maurice Manning, President of the Human Rights Commission.
Dr Manning criticised the manner in which the Criminal Justice Bill of this year was made an act. He stated that in this case the Oireachtas was dominated by the executive branch. There was inadequate use of the Committees System – a system, he said, that is in place to prevent legislation from being rushed through without due consideration to all its implications. He bemoaned the, ‘arrogance of ministers’, in rushing through this piece of legislation, regretting that they did not exercise fully their right and duty of parliamentary scrutiny.
In a further denouncement of the way in which the 2007 Act became incorporated into Irish law, Michael O’Higgins SC, Chairman of the Irish Criminal Bar Association, contrasted the parliamentary process it went through with the considerably more rigorous debate that surrounded the enactment of the Criminal Justice Act 1984. He observed that the 1984 Act was debated by the Oireachtas for 18 months, including 13 days in which it was examined at the Committee Stage. In stark contrast, in O’Higgins’ opinion, the 2007 Bill was passed without any effective debate. He accused the Opposition of wasting the opportunity they had, at the Report Stage, of debating the Bill section by section, by instead deciding to engage in, ‘electoral muscle-flexing’, by proposing additional sections to it.
The process came in for further criticism from him because in his opinion, there was no meaningful debate on the infringement posed by the Act to the right to silence.
According to O’Higgins, the Act was passed in such a hasty manner for a number of reasons, notably a lack of public engagement with government. In his view, the electorate voted for the current government for the same reasons shareholders elect a CEO – government today is more about economic management than it was in the 1980s. He described this paradigm shift in Irish society when he said that the Oireachtas of 1984 governed over people, while that of 2007 governs a nation of individuals.
He acknowledged that there has been an increase in violent crime since the 1980s, saying that as, ‘property prices have soared, the price of life has plummeted.’ He concluded that as long as the diminution of rights is seen by society as only the diminution of certain people in society’s rights – those of suspected criminals – we as a whole will be poorer.
James MacGuill in turn credited the media for calling for a delay in the enactment of the Bill. However, he was scathing with his words for the then Tánaiste, Michael McDowell, saying that one, ‘can’t blame the media for the madness of the Tánaiste’, in relation to the Act.
The conference heard from Des Hogan, Acting Chief Executive of the Irish Human Rights Commission about certain aspects of criminal justice policy and their effect on human rights. He called for caution when deciding to change the criminal law, reflecting that:
‘On the one hand the desire to change the law to meet perceived new threats of crime and on the other, the imperative of approaching any law reform proposals carefully when long-established rights are at issue.’
With regard to the expansion of police detention powers that the 2007 Act allows, he commented that:
‘No empirical evidence supports the contention that prolonged detention benefits investigation or increases the possibility of a successful conviction, and indeed no one has yet been detained for the full 168-hour period under the 1996 Act.’
While concluding that there is an increasing perception that decreasing the rights of the suspect by definition increases the safety and protects the interests of victims and wider society, he warned against balancing and rebalancing human rights principles depending on short-term political motivations.
This view was shared by other speakers at the conference, including Sir Geoffrey Bindman, Chairman of the British Institute of Human Rights, who spoke of the need to counter the myth that human rights are a way of helping guilty parties escape justice or of enabling wrongdoers to delay and add to the cost of the legal process.
Senator Ivana Bacik, who chaired the opening session, spoke of the need to review and challenge the idea that there can be a trade-off between civil liberties and civil security.
Past conferences have dealt with issues such as Human Rights in Committed Relationships, Migrant Workers and Human Rights Law, and Achieving Rights Based Child Law. However, in the words of Dr Manning, yesterday’s theme of Human Rights and Criminal Justice, was more controversial and certainly most timely in the light of the current problems, on the one hand of increased violent criminality, and on the other of criminal justice legislation being rushed through the Dáil.
Photos from Hjem and Simon McGarr
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