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The Committee on the Administration of Justice has campaigned for a Bill of Rights since the 1980’s. We are now at a crucial stage with the development of the Bill of Rights forum. This Fourm must bring the debate about rights out and about as widely as possible.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu signing up for the Bill of Rights.
CAJ has campaigned for a Bill of Rights since the 1980’s. Our commitment to this project included drawing up a draft Bill of Rights.
We also stressed that provision for a Bill of Rights be made in any peace negotiations, and this was addressed by the inclusion in the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of such a provision.
Since then, there has been a consultation process conducted by the NI Human Rights Commission, a subsequent lull, and more recently the establishment of the Bill of Rights Forum to move the debate ahead.
The debate about a Bill of Rights is clearly linked to a wider debate around a culture of rights. In short, a Bill of Rights will not survive or flourish in an environment that is hostile to human rights. It is crucial that in working to develop a Bill of Rights, time is taken to generate a real, meaningful and participative conversation about what human rights really are, what difference they can make to people’s lives, and how the way we all do our business can be transformed to respect human rights.
In discussion of a culture of rights, much is often made of the need for a matching culture of responsibilities. Obviously, any talk about human rights engages one in a growing awareness of one’s responsibility to accord the same respect to other’s rights as to one’s own. However, a clear concern is that the conjunction of “rights and responsibilities” is often loosely interpreted as “if you behave irresponsibly, you lose your rights”. There are clear legal,policy and ethical reasons why CAJ has not supported this position.
Download an application form for the Information Pack
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NVTV have produced a short CAJ Bill of Rights Programme, showing how the pack is used and discussing what a Bill of Rights for NI means.
The latest edition of our Information Pack is designed to generate discussion at community level on how a Bill of Rights could be made relevant to local circumstances, so that this can feed into the discussions of the Bill of Rights Forum.
The Forum clearly has a crucial role to play in rejuvenating discussion around a Bill of Rights. In generating a real, meaningful and participative conversation about what human rights really are and what difference they can make to people’s lives, the Forum needs to talk to persons across the jurisdiction.
As such it needs to develop a comprehensive and properly resourced outreach strategy that enables people to contribute to the Forum’s deliberations.
In its opening statement to the inaugural Forum meeting, CAJ stressed that the Forum should not allow discussion of a Bill of Rights to happen around a table in Belfast, but rather should bring the debate about rights out and about as widely as possible.
In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, when talking of the Universal Declaration -
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
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