OPINION:Human rights and equality must survive the chill winds of recession and the eventual recovery plans by being respected by Government, write KATHERINE ZAPPONEand MICHAEL FARRELL.
A BITTER wind has been blowing across the human rights landscape for some months now and it has left a trail of destruction in its wake.
Human rights and equality bodies that took years to develop have been forced to shut up shop or rendered almost ineffective through choking off of their funds.
The Combat Poverty Agency and the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI) have been closed down just when poverty is set to grow exponentially and racism is again a danger. The Equality Authority, widely regarded as a model of its kind, has been so badly affected that its highly respected former chief executive and almost half its board felt obliged to resign.
The Human Rights Commission, of which we are members, has had its funding slashed so that it is left with the budget of a medium-sized NGO.
The National Action Plan Against Racism has been wound up with nothing to take its place, and the Centre for Early Childhood Development and Education, a champion and driver for change for children in disadvantaged areas, has been shut down.
There is more. Disability groups fear major cutbacks are on their way and there has just been a massive reduction in Overseas Development Aid.
Of course, these are difficult times and we have all been told that we must tighten our belts. But the cuts in the human rights and equality area are totally disproportionate to the rest of the public sector. Even the most benign interpretation suggests that to the Government human rights, anti-racism and equality are seen as optional extras, or at best, as unsuccessful competitors for funding with more important “branches” of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.
This would be bad enough at the best of times, but in the middle of a recession when the weakest are very likely to go to the wall and vigorous human rights advocacy is more important than ever, its effects will be seriously damaging.
Bodies like Combat Poverty and the Equality Authority were hard fought for and did a lot to highlight the social implications of government policies and to combat gender, race, disability and age discrimination and develop better practices in employment and society generally. If their skills and expertise were to be lost, bad practices would creep back and it would take years to rebuild what has been lost.
Salvaging the economy is a vital task but we are concerned that an exclusive focus on economics will create a vacuum for the promotion of social justice and protecting the interests of diverse and vulnerable groups. Because the economy is in recession, our national sense of justice and moral compass do not have to go into recession as well.
And when we pull out of this recession, if we do so at the expense of social justice, dignity and equal respect for all, we will be building on brittle foundations and laying the basis for industrial and social strife in the future.
When we look around the battered human rights landscape, we see that, apart from a much weakened Equality Authority, the Human Rights Commission is one of the few public bodies in the field which is still left standing, even if it is rather shaky on its feet. In this context we wanted, as commission members to look at our role in this new situation.
This new reality places a lot more responsibility on the commission to help keep the flame of human rights burning, however, dimly, in the current and coming period. It will have considerably reduced resources to meet that responsibility, which means that we will have to look carefully at our own practices and priorities.
In a period of, we hope, economic rebuilding, we will need to focus more on protecting the economic, social and cultural rights of the vulnerable and those at risk. We will need as well to work harder to combat racism – likely to grow if indigenous workers succumb to the temptation to blame immigrant workers for job losses – and work for integration and respect for diversity. Moreover, we will have to do it without the help of the NCCRI, with whom we worked very closely over the years.
We are conscious that the commission will have to learn to talk in a less lawyerly way to get our message across to a broader public, without, we hope, losing the legal and ethical rigour, based on constitutional and international human rights standards, for which we believe the commission is widely respected.
But perhaps most of all the commission can only meet this challenge by working in partnership with others who are also committed to rebuilding our society, founded on a culture of equality and human rights.
There are plenty of potential partners out there: the international human rights bodies in Europe and at the UN; the other national human rights institutions, especially our colleagues in the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and also the new commissions in Scotland, England and Wales; the NGOs and bodies representing the vulnerable in our society – the disabled, the ethnic minorities and those who experience poverty and marginalisation; the trade unions; the artists; and many in the churches and the political system who are shocked at how a human rights and equality infrastructure that was painstakingly built up over decades could be gutted almost overnight.
There is a huge challenge ahead but if the people of the United States can rediscover hope and respect for human rights after the years of Iraq, rendition and Guantánamo, then yes, we can do so too.
Katherine Zappone and Michael Farrell are members of the Irish Human Rights Commission and this article is based on presentations they made to a recent strategy discussion by the commission. It is written in their personal capacity. Katherine Zappone is executive director of the Centre for Progressive Change and Michael Farrell is the Senior Solicitor with Free Legal Advice Centres (Flac)