Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Bill

I am glad to follow the right hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley). I welcomed what I took to be his total, unqualified commitment to the pursuit of partnership in the administration of Northern Ireland. I hope that that, in conjunction with the commitment of the associated parties, will bear fruit in the near future, and that there will be a true partnership developing trust for all the people. As for the right hon. Gentleman’s remarks about the Human Rights Commission, I suggest to him that he may be slightly prejudiced because of his adverse—as he sees it—personal relationship with members of the commission. I do not think anyone in the House would deny the necessity of human rights, or the desirability of a commission to deal with that important subject. My hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) strongly articulated many of the problems that my party identifies in this Bill, but that does not mean that there are not also positive things in it. One of the positives is—to follow on from the comments of the right hon. Member for North Antrim—the giving of investigatory powers to the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. Had they been in place earlier, there might have been different outcomes in certain matters in times past. At present, the commission does not have the power to call on persons or to call for papers, or, where it is following a particular line of investigation that requires entry, to have the right to enter. There is nothing unique about such an organisation having such powers. That is laid down in the United Nations Paris principles on human rights—and, after all, a human rights body must have some investigatory powers, or how will it carry out its investigations? If there are no powers to get answers, there is no point in having an investigation, and therefore no point in having a commission. So such powers are essential. There is also an anomaly in Ireland. The Irish Human Rights Commission has investigatory powers that were also to apply to the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, but somehow they did not—they fell off the table, so to speak. In the north, the Equality Commission already has investigatory powers as, obviously, does the police ombudsman, and the children’s commissioner also rightly has powers of entry and inspection. Those are normal and necessary powers for any body to have that protects their citizens and carries out investigations on behalf of the community. We pointed out the failure to give those powers to the human rights commission during the passage through Parliament of the Northern Ireland Act 1998. The Secretary of State at that time gave a commitment that although it did not have those powers, full co-operation would be given to the commission in its investigations. As far as I know, that co-operation did not happen. The commission found itself on occasion refused entry into places of detention when it required to gain entry to pursue complaints that it was investigating.