The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission is what Americans call a real train wreck isn't it? Like all train wrecks, you could only watch it, helpless as the carriages are derailed, jack-knife and turn over to block the permanent way. They need to bring in heavy lifting gear to clear the track after a mess like that. It takes ages. It's going to be the same with the NIHRC.
The train driver, Brice Dickson, the chief commissioner, is trapped in his cab, doomed. It's all very sad for him. For over 20 years he campaigned for a bill of rights for Northern Ireland and when the Good Friday Agreement declared that a commission would be established by act of Parliament he was the obvious candidate to run it. He had been the foremost academic lawyer in the field in the north for years. He knew the issues inside out.
Now he's mortally wounded. There's no pressure on the dead man's handle. His train's going nowhere. He's in a pretty dreadful position. He can't go on but he can't go yet. It's plain to all that Dickson can't continue as chief commissioner with the leaders of both Sinn Féin and the SDLP asking for his resignation and that the commission be reorganised. It was nationalists and republicans who pushed for a human rights commission during the negotiations leading up to the agreement. Amazingly unionists were, and continue to be, very iffy about the whole notion of human rights. Indeed it was difficult to find people of a recognisably unionist complexion to sit on the commission. But if the leaders of the parties which wanted the commission in the first place find Dickson unacceptable then he can't go on.
However, he can't go yet. If he were to resign now the commission would collapse which would be a triumph for the DUP and anti-agreement unionists in general: for them yet another pillar of the detested agreement would have disintegrated under the weight of its own contradictions. For human rights campaigners on the other hand, once the commission collapsed how to rebuild it? Dickson therefore hangs on in office on a life support system until a new chief commissioner acceptable across the board is found.
Until that time the commission lies derailed. In the absence of any commissioners clearly identifiable as representative of the nationalist community it would be folly for the rump of commissioners remaining to proceed to produce a bill of rights particularly as the content of such a document is at the heart of the dispute which led to the resignations of Inez McCormack, Patrick Yu and Professor Christine Bell.
How did we get to this point? Since Dickson's train began to come off the rails in 2001 local politicians have stood aside and let it happen. Sure, it's independent, though that hasn't stopped the NIO from interfering in its affairs. Even so, why did ministers in the executive in 2002, especially SDLP and SF ministers, not take action to avert the train wreck everyone saw was about to happen?
Brice Dickson's ill-advised letter to Ronnie Flanagan about the Holy Cross case was only the issue which brought the internal dissension into the open. The real problem was that by 2001 it had become apparent the commission was in danger of trying to re-define the nature of the division in the north of Ireland. Instead of following the remit given to it by the Good Friday Agreement, namely to produce a bill of rights 'to reflect the principles of mutual respect for the identity and ethos of both communities' in the north and, 'to reflect the particular circumstances of Northern Ireland' some in the commission were trying to pretend that the priority here should be individual rights already covered by the European Convention on Human Rights.
The best evidence of that attempt is that the only party which supports the commission's current calamitous state is the NIO's front party, a party which pretends there aren't two communities in the north, a position which next week's election will show has the support of about two per cent of voters.
Whatever else happens after the election the priority for the Irish and British governments must be to fix the north's human rights commission. There is a suspicion among nationalists that the NIO is not unhappy at the mess the commission has got itself into, indeed that the NIO was none too happy about a powerful independent commission in the first place: perhaps that's why it initially awarded it the disgracefully paltry budget?
You have to ask would the NIO have advised the British administration here to stand idly by while any other body of comparable importance became a train wreck?
