Incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into Irish law would assist in making the island of Ireland an area where common rights exist, a senior official of the European Court of Human Rights has said.
The British government is committed to bringing the convention into British law this year, which will leave Ireland as the only EU member that has not incorporated the convention, which it signed 45 years ago.
Mr Michael O'Boyle, an official in the Registry of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, told a Dublin conference that while it was not necessary to incorporate the convention, there was a strong argument in terms of contributing to a sense of solidarity with other members of the Council of Europe that had incorporated it.
Mr John Hedigan SC, judge-elect of the European Court of Human Rights, said the court had been reformed and the number of cases it was dealing with had grown. The system whereby a person or state taking a case had to submit it to the Commission for initial judgment had gone. The new full-time court dealt with all cases.
The convention aimed to protect the human rights of 900 million European citizens, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the amount of work was "overwhelming", he said.
Mr O'Boyle said while the convention did not require incorporation, it was a mechanism by which the convention guarantees were made more effective.
In many respects the case law of the European Court of Human Rights was more extensive and developed than the Supreme Court. In some respects, though, the Irish Constitution offers higher standards.
A former Bar Council chairman, Mr Frank Clarke SC, said there were advantages in incorporation, but they might not be as great as some believed. That was not an argument against incorporation. The differences between the Irish Constitution and the European convention was one of differences between legal and political cultures.
The weight given to freedom of expression was higher in the European Court convention than in the Irish courts. In that instance, it was not necessarily the text of the Constitution or the Convention, but the jurisprudence, or judgment, made by the European Court that would make a difference if the convention was incorporated.
The media law lecturer at NUI Galway, Ms Marie McGonagle, agreed. She pointed to the tradition of balancing rights in judgments made by the European Court of Human Rights and the centrality of freedom of expression. She also quoted from the court's rulings, showing how it gave the media a central role in modern democracy and a watchdog role in society.
Mr Clarke said the Supreme Court now viewed judgments of the European Court as persuasive. The range of influences on Irish constitutional law had widened in recent years.