Human Rights and Making Change: Looking Backwards and Moving Forwards from the Northern Ireland High Court Decision on Abortion

This post first appeared on the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights blog from the Faculty of Law at University College Cork.

Dr Catherine O’Rourke is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights and International Law at Ulster University Transitional Justice Institute. She is currently also co-coordinator of the Gender Stream of the DFID-funded Political Settlements Research Programme, where she is investigating how international law norms for gender equality influence domestic power-brokering.

In the aftermath of last week’s High Court judgment declaring Northern Ireland’s prohibition of abortion to be incompatible with UK human rights legislation in specific instances, there has been much valuable consideration of the judgment’s legal and political implications, for this jurisdiction and others.  In this contribution, I reflect on what the litigation and judgment say about human rights advocacy in Northern Ireland.

In summer 2013, in response to the Department of Health, Social Services, and Public Safety consultation on the draft ‘Guidance on the Limited Circumstances of Termination of Pregnancy’, I blogged on the need for local human rights organisations to ‘step-up’ to defend the human rights under threat by the failure of successive governments to bring clarity to abortion law in the jurisdiction, as well as the (then) urgent threat posed by the manifold potential civil and political rights violations raised by the 2013 Draft Guidance. The context for the call to local human rights organisations, including the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, to begin to advocate on the access to abortion as a human rights issue reflected several years of silence and inaction in the face of clear human rights concerns presented by the legal status quo. Specifically, the call reflected the failure of any local human rights organisation to support the request for an inquiry to be conducted by the CEDAW Committee under the Convention’s Optional Protocol into access to abortion in Northern Ireland.

Since summer 2013, much has changed. While I was writing my call for the local human rights community to ‘step up’ on abortion and human rights in Northern Ireland, the Committee on the Administration of Justice, Amnesty International and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission were all preparing responses to the consultation on the 2013 draft Guidance, emphasizing the manifold human rights compliance concerns raised therein.

Amnesty International has made reform to abortion law in Northern Ireland one of its priorities in its ‘My Body, My Rights’ campaign, involving inter alia the excellent report ‘Northern Ireland: Barriers to Accessing Abortion Services’. The Committee on the Administration of Justice has started to include access to abortion as a human rights concern in its 2015 shadow reporting to CESCR and to the Human Rights Committee. This marked an important new departure for a human rights organisation that had not previously raised the issue of abortion even in its shadow reporting to the CEDAW Committee.

The transformation of the approach of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission to abortion is arguably the most notable of all. In its 2008 Guidance to the Secretary of State on the proposed content for a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland, the Human Rights Commission included only one reference to abortion:

The issue of women’s rights in respect of reproduction, and especially the issue of termination of pregnancy, has been one of the most controversial in the Commission’s consultations on a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland. Forceful and deeply felt submissions have been made, in respect of a right to life for unborn children and in respect of a right of choice for women. There is no clear widely accepted international standard in respect of the underlying issues. (emphasis added)

In 2015, the Commission initiated the judicial review proceedings that were to ultimately prove successful in last week’s High Court decision, determining that Northern Ireland’s prohibition of abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormality and in cases of sexual crime, up to the date when the foetus can exist independently, is incompatible with UK human rights legislation. The proceedings included also a third party written intervention from the Amnesty International Belfast office, in addition to Alliance for Choice, the Family Planning Association, Sarah Ewart and a number of anti-choice organisations.

Why the change and where to from here? When considered within the broader context of human rights advocacy in Northern Ireland, the significance of the litigation and its outcome is even more apparent. Local developments in human rights advocacy in Northern Ireland reflect – and were no doubt reinforced by – important legal developments in the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence on access to abortion since Tysiac v Poland, and developed most notably through A,B,C v Ireland, RR v Poland and P and S v Poland. For rights issues that are locally contentious, such as abortion, the clear articulation of regional human rights obligations can be helpful in emboldening and providing cover for local human rights organisations to take on such issues. (There are inevitably limitations, however, in a human rights approach that articulates right of access to abortion in limited circumstances as a matter of private and family life, but not as a matter of gender equality.) The importance of the international is also evident from the central role of Amnesty International’s Belfast office to the litigation and surrounding press and public affairs activity. Amnesty International adopted the ‘My Body, My Rights’ campaign at a global level and, since then, has pursued a very active local campaign on abortion and human rights, in coordination with local pro-choice groups and constituencies. Arguably important also has been the diversification of human rights advocacy more broadly in the jurisdiction. From the traditional almost exclusive focus on conflict and post-conflict accountability issues (which I document in chapter 3 of my book, Gender Politics in Transitional Justice), contemporary human rights advocacy in Northern Ireland now takes in a broad swathe of issues from marriage equality to mental health and many others.

Taken together, these international, regional and locally-led developments have created a very changed context for pro-choice advocacy in Northern Ireland. Whereas human rights and pro-choice organisations traditionally maintained separate spheres of activity, with little cooperation or interface, last week’s High Court judgment evidences the potential effectiveness of coordinated strategies across human rights and pro-choice groups. Looking forward, as we consider strategies for translating the High Court judgment into progressive legal change, the particular skills of the human rights community in activating international scrutiny, combined with the critical role of pro-choice groups in continuing the articulate the essential equality arguments in working for social change, offer reasons for optimism.