Sir, – The Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence has announced a decision by Government to merge the Equality Authority and the Irish Human Rights Commission (Home News, September 10th).
Alan Shatter notes his intention to “unequivocally keep faith with the Paris Principles”, international standards for the operation of human rights institutions. This is to be welcomed.
The Minister intends to make the new body accountable to the Oireachtas committee system, something which has been called for by the Equality Rights Alliance as an important step in enhancing the independence of the body, and which is in keeping with recommendations contained in the Paris Principles.
A further step in enhancing its independence would be to ensure that appointments to the body are made through an open procedure, with clear criteria, and to allow the body to recruit its own staff, thus ending the process of secondment from the Civil Service.
The Paris Principles also call for human rights institutions to be adequately funded. The current funding levels of both the Human Rights Commission and the Equality Authority are by no means sufficient to allow them to discharge their statutory functions. Both Government parties were highly critical of the budget cuts that were made by the previous administration three years ago. It remains to be seen whether they will remedy this by making necessary resources available to the new body. This will be an essential starting point in ensuring the new unified body is truly effective.
Also, if the Minister is serious about the purpose of this merger being “to promote human rights and equality in a more effective, efficient and cohesive way”, then we would hope to see the introduction of legislation to consolidate the powers of this new entity so that the same legal instruments could be deployed across both the equality and human rights strands. At a minimum, this legislation should introduce a socio-economic ground in equality legislation and should also introduce a positive duty for the public sector to strengthen the commitment in the Programme for Government to require public bodies to have due regard to equality and human rights in carrying out their functions. – Yours, etc,