David QuinnThis country should not be singled out for special blame
From time to time Ireland appears before this or that committee of the UN to be chastised about its human rights record. In recent times we have appeared before the UN Committee Against Torture and soon enough we will be appearing before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Last week it was our turn to appear before the UN Human Rights Committee. These UN committees love to lecture us about our restrictive abortion law (now weakened of course by the ‘Protection of Human Life During Pregnancy Act’).
We were told by the UN Human Rights committee last week that we are in breach of international law which apparently recognises a right to abortion. Except that it doesn’t. No right to abortion has ever been recognised under international law and no right to abortion is to be found in any UN treaty or convention.
Instead what we have are interpretations of those treaties and conventions. Some people believe they can be interpreted in such a way as to create a right to abortion. But these interpretations are opinions and nothing more and just because these interpretations are often offered by members of these UN committees doesn’t make them any more than opinions.
With regard to UN treaties, only the member states who negotiated them and signed them have the right to authoritatively state that they include a right to abortion and they have never done so and are extremely unlikely to do so for the foreseeable future.
Delegation
The person leading the Government delegation that appeared before the UN committee in Geneva last week was Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald. For the most part she tugged the forelock to the committee members.
In respect of our abortion law she merely said that it can’t be further changed without another referendum. What she should have done was defend it and defend our Constitution. She should have stood up to the committee. She was far too deferential.
(It’s curious and worth noting that this same Government, which prides itself on not being deferential towards the Catholic Church, should be so deferential towards international bodies like the UN even though the UN has been embroiled in repeated corruption scandals, and worse).
Let’s go into how these UN committees work in a bit more detail. Their job is to oversee how well the various member states of the UN are implementing the various UN treaties and conventions they have signed, for example, the UN Treaty Against Torture, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child or the UN Convention on Economic Social and Cultural rights.
The member states, including Ireland, then appear before these committees every few years. But because there are so many committees and so many treaties and conventions this can sometimes seem like a non-stop process.
Prior to appearing before one of these committees, home-based NGOs (Non-Government Organisations or advocacy groups) are invited to make submissions of their own to the relevant committee and give their own views on how well or how badly we are implementing this or that treaty.
Submission
The NGOs are almost invariably pro-abortion and have politically correct opinions on virtually all issues.
Essentially they provide the committees with the questions to ask our Government. The committee members are very happy to ask those questions because they normally share the same worldview as the NGOs themselves.
Only one pro-life NGO from Ireland made a submission to the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) prior to last week’s meeting, namely Family & Life, and only two Irish pro-life groups appeared before the committee, the aforementioned Family & Life and the Pro-Life Campaign.
Family & Life reported on its website the pressure being brought to bear on a willing committee from pro-abortion groups: “The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and the Abortion Rights Campaign all made oral interventions denying the right to life of the unborn. Among the other pro-abortion NGOs urging the HRC to pressure Ireland to make its abortion law even more liberal were the US-based Centre for Reproductive Rights, the Irish Family Planning Association (the Irish affiliate of Planned Parenthood), and the Women’s Human Rights Alliance, a project of the National Women’s Council of Ireland which, like many pro-abortion groups in Ireland, has received lavish funding from Atlantic Philanthropies.”
Ireland also came under pressure on a range of other issues, for example, the predominance of denominational schools here, the issue of mother and baby homes, symphysiotomy, a supposedly Catholic-inspired alternative to caesarean sections, and the Magdalen laundries.
Questions
But the public here is showing no real appetite to end our denominational education system, other countries had mother and baby homes, other countries had Magdalen laundries, and to this day the World Health Organisations recommends symphysiotomy as an alternative to caesarean sections when medical conditions are deemed unsafe for caesareans.
The singling out of Ireland in respect of all these issues is simply unacceptable. Yes, we do have some questions to answer, but we should not allow ourselves to be held up for special blame over them out of all the nations of the world. When that happens, we know we are dealing with a strong ideological agenda that often has Catholicism in its sights.
It is clearly too much to expect our politicians to stand up to these UN committees. They will continue to be deferential instead.
The best we can do for now is to ensure that as many pro-life and family NGOs as possible appear before these committees and strongly challenge the politically correct interpretation of ‘human rights’ currently on offer.