The Belfast Agreement is made up of two closely related agreements.\u00a0The first is the British-Irish\u00a0Agreement, which is a treaty between the UK and Ireland.\u00a0The second is the Multi-Party Agreement,\u00a0which is a political agreement between the British and Irish governments and several different\u00a0political parties of Northern Ireland, an agreement that provides the foundation for the peace\u00a0process. This political agreement turns in part on various commitments made by the British\u00a0government and the Irish government. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nThe simplest way to achieve this end might be to maintain the law of Northern Ireland as it\u00a0stands<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The British-Irish Agreement does not refer to the ECHR at all and none of its terms suggest in any\u00a0way that the UK or Ireland were undertaking to remain member states of the ECHR in perpetuity. The British-Irish Agreement does note that the UK and Ireland are both \u2018partners in the European\u00a0Union\u2019, but no one is seriously suggesting that the UK\u2019s withdrawal from the EU is in breach of the\u00a0terms of the agreement. \u00a0<\/p>\n
In signing the British-Irish Agreement, the UK and Ireland agreed \u2018to support, and where appropriate\u00a0implement, the Multi-Party Agreement\u2019. This obligation does not simply make the terms of the\u00a0Multi-Party Agreement binding on the UK and Ireland in international law, but instead requires the\u00a0British government and the Irish government to do their best, as they see it, to make the political\u00a0agreement work over time. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Multi-Party Agreement does include several references to the ECHR.\u00a0The context, which\u00a0includes the troubled history of Northern Ireland and fears about the risks of abuse of devolved\u00a0power, makes it very clear that these references concern the importance of the law of Northern\u00a0Ireland imposing limits on the new Assembly and on public bodies exercising devolved power. Each\u00a0reference to the ECHR in the Multi-Party Agreement concerns the domestic law of Northern Ireland\u00a0and has nothing whatsoever to do with the individual right of petition to the Strasbourg Court or,\u00a0more generally, with the UK or Ireland\u2019s acceptance of the Court\u2019s jurisdiction or its developing\u00a0jurisprudence as a matter of international law. British or Irish withdrawal from the ECHR would in no\u00a0way undercut, breach or cut across the Multi-Party Agreement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The enactment of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 and section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998, insofar\u00a0as it applied to Northern Ireland, discharged the British government\u2019s commitment to incorporate\u00a0the ECHR into the law of Northern Ireland as a safeguard against the abuse of devolved power.\u00a0The\u00a0commitment concerns public bodies exercising devolved power and not the British government\u00a0itself and, certainly, not the Westminster parliament. If a future government withdraws the UK from\u00a0the ECHR, the UK\u2019s duty to support the Multi-Party Agreement can continue to be met by maintaining limits in the law of Northern Ireland on the devolved institutions and on public bodies\u00a0exercising devolved power. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The simplest way to achieve this end might be, in effect, to maintain the law of Northern Ireland as it\u00a0stands, but what matters is the substance of restraint and reassurance, rather than particular legal\u00a0form.\u00a0The spirit of the Multi-Party Agreement does not forbid ECHR withdrawal, but rather requires\u00a0the British government to engage the different parties in discussion about how, or whether, to\u00a0amend the law of Northern Ireland after the UK leaves the Convention.\u00a0Such engagement should\u00a0provide reassurance that there will be no diminution of the rights that the agreement was\u00a0concerned to protect and that there will be no change in the constitutional status of Northern\u00a0Ireland within the United Kingdom. This would be engagement with the participants within the spirit\u00a0and the terms of the Belfast Agreement, not\u00a0renegotiation\u00a0of the agreement. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement also refers to the ECHR. However, this treaty is not\u00a0some kind of a second lock on ECHR withdrawal. On the contrary, the Trade and Cooperation\u00a0Agreement clearly anticipates that the UK or another member state, such as Ireland, might leave the\u00a0ECHR and then makes provision for trade and cooperation to continue nonetheless, subject to a\u00a0right of termination.\u00a0In entering into this agreement, the UK and Ireland (as an EU member state)\u00a0have jointly accepted that ECHR withdrawal would not undermine their existing obligations under\u00a0the British-Irish Agreement, including in relation to the Multi-Party Agreement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Whatever the merits of UK withdrawal from the ECHR, nothing in the Belfast Agreement rules it out\u00a0as a viable course of action.\u00a0In his foreword to our Policy Exchange paper, Jack Straw, a significant\u00a0member of the cabinet that reached the Belfast Agreement, also makes this point; Lord Alton, the\u00a0chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, who also opposes UK withdrawal from the ECHR,\u00a0takes a similar view.\u00a0In choosing to exercise the UK\u2019s right to withdraw from the ECHR, a future\u00a0government would neither be flouting the UK\u2019s international obligations under the Belfast\u00a0Agreement nor failing to respect the political settlement that grounds the peace process.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It has become an article of\u00a0faith in some quarters that the UK\u2019s withdrawal from the European Convention\u00a0on Human…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-387964","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-northern-ireland","14":"tag-scotland","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115125890910098380","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}