Speech by NIHRC Chief Commissioner Alyson Kilpatrick: Examining the Relationship between the European Convention on Human Rights and the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement

We have been here before. We have gathered to discuss the existential threat to human rights; we look at it and worry about it, but it never actually happens.

This time feels different, because the threat is coming from the right and left of politics and it is gaining political momentum across the Council of Europe.

It is fuelled by a sophisticated communications strategy, posted directly into everyone’s phone, telling us that we should be terrified about immigration and terrified of those people who seek refuge here.

It hits people where it hurts – during a cost of living crisis and after decades of stress – with the fear that society is collapsing under the pressure of people arriving in small boats.

This is a vicious circle. The rhetoric, then the fear, is driving politics, which then fuels the fear and so it goes on.

We get to a place where it doesn’t matter what the truth is. 
Solutions are sought, not for the actual problem and not for longer term, but for the more immediate suppression of anxiety.

The scapegoat, and therefore the target, is the ECHR and its Court in Strasbourg.

There is strength in numbers, 27 member states of the Council of Europe are coming together, to issue a joint statement, seeking to influence the interpretation of the ECHR by the Strasbourg Court and indirectly our own domestic courts.

Because this is a ‘moment’ that is shared across many of the so-called progressive countries, it is persuasive. But it is no more honest just because there are more Governments signing up to it.

I recognise that might sound sacrilegious and undemocratic, but only if democracy does not value minorities. When times are difficult, it is easier to overlook minorities but, as Baroness Hale said so beautifully, “democracy values everyone equally, even if the majority does not.”

This should never be a simple game of winner takes all but even if it was, those who wish to remain in the ECHR, and all that goes with it, are the majority. 
Before this goes any further, we need clarity about the consequences.

To withdraw from or undermine fundamentally the UK’s commitment to the ECHR, dilute its enforcement machinery, limit access to a wholly independent judiciary, seek to influence that judiciary OR rewrite parts of the Convention so as to disapply their full force for people deemed problematic, would not only denigrate the Belfast Good Friday Agreement, but would amount to a breach of commitments made in an international treaty.

The current debate is political – which I don’t say as criticism necessarily – politicians can and should debate such issues, but this is political expression which is without any real evidence base, relying only on feelings that have been manipulated.

The vast majority of those who have compiled evidence, report that it undermines the legitimacy of the concerns that appear to fuel the feelings leading to this debate.

It appears to be a response to a perception of what the public want and therefore will vote for; it is undermined by its own flawed legal reasoning; it belittles regard for the rule of law; it degrades the sanctity of human life; it would be undemocratic; and would ultimately be contrary to the values that the UK espouses.

There isn’t time to present an authoritative defence of the Convention today, but the relationship of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement to the Convention demonstrates its greatest virtues and explains its continued relevance in Northern Ireland.

I will take the risk of seeing eyerolling, by referring back to the world war in Europe, during which there was mass murder and brutality, mostly of people singled out because of their identity. 
This was made possible, acceptable even, in polite society, by a disinformation machine that was so coordinated and sophisticated, ‘ordinary people’, as well as the racists and bigots, went along with it.

At the same time, Europe saw economic disaster, a breakdown in democracy, an abandonment of civilised principles and the mass migration of Europe’s most vulnerable.

Such collective revulsion was there that the political leaders came together to try to understand and recover. Their answer, not overnight, but with foresight and shrewdness, was the universal declaration of human rights – the recognition and protection of people, by virtue of their membership of the human race – without qualification.

Europe was on its knees but politicians led, and set the vision, for nations. That happened in the midst of destruction, not in the warm afterglow of conflict.

The worst conflict ever seen made it essential, not by anyone’s analysis at the time burdensome or inconvenient, to value and protect the individual, from wherever they came or whatever their circumstances.

Nowhere will you find anything that suggests otherwise. And I repeat – this was across a Europe in ruins.

So sure were European leaders about the principles, that they moved beyond the declaration to a binding guarantee of human treatment, which could never be diluted. Despite the fragility, each State signed up to be subject to standards that apply to every single person within their jurisdiction.

Therefore, the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

The UK was one of the first.

Many followed, but the UK continued to lead for many years.
In the 1990s, the Labour Government was one of its strongest advocates.

They argued for certainty in its application, not discretion. Hence the Human Rights Act, meant to bring the Convention home and make its rights feel more practical and effective, for the benefit of the people of the UK.

In Northern Ireland we had decades of brutality, during which people turned on each other and against authority. The authorities also turned against people adopting ‘unusual’ methods to suppress disunity. Terror was the word most commonly used in relation to NI when I was growing up. 
Political negotiations began, that eventually culminated in the Belfast Good Friday Agreement, which was underwritten to give it practical meaning and effect. So much so, that it was the promise that could be relied upon to bring an end to conflict.

As well as the International Treaty between the British and Irish Governments there is the domestic legislation of the Northern Ireland Act, putting human rights at the centre of NI law; and the Human Rights Act that completed incorporation of the Convention into NI law.

It was also a part of the Agreement and then the legislative machinery that there would be a strong independent Human Rights Commission empowered to advise, monitor and if necessary, challenge government if it failed to comply with its human rights obligations.

The Commission was set up as a National Human Rights Commission in line with the Paris Principles and has been accredited at the United Nations, with speaking rights before the Human Rights Council. We were the first human rights commission on these islands.

All of that reinforces the importance and centrality of external oversight. The guarantee that enabled a seismic shirt was that every human being would be protected by an internationally agreed and enforced human rights framework, which was outside the hands of the State itself.

That was what enabled the rebuilding of trust in and between Ireland, Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

When devolution happened, this was so critically important that the devolved administration was prevented from legislating in a way that would breach the Convention. In such a case, our courts will declare the legislation null and void. 
This was carefully thought-through. It was not in ignorance of what the Convention contained, or how it had been interpreted over decades. Remember, many of the seminal cases affecting NI occurred prior to the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and incorporation of the Convention.

Most of the cases on the right to life (Article 2), on torture and inhuman and degrading treatment (Article 3), on covert surveillance techniques (Article 8), by way of example only, had been determined.

It was explicit that even if a cohort of people were alleged to be problematic, or even convicted of, being dangerous to national security, their status as members of the human race meant they were entitled to ask a court to force the State to ensure their human rights were enjoyed equally.

The courts have always recognised that a member state can and should determine its own criminal justice policy, police its own streets, deny liberty to offenders and control access at borders, so long as it does not, in its treatment of people fall below the basic standards.

From the Universal Declaration onwards, and during the NI peace process, a critical assumption has been that the Convention represents the floor, not the ceiling, for rights protection.

That is not just a slogan – it goes to the heart of everything.

If it is not a guarantee against regression, or a certain promise that no cohort of people will ever be singled out as less worthy of protection, then it is not very much, and therefore neither is the Belfast Agreement.

The Convention is a living instrument –of course - It can develop to better protect people in meeting modern challenges - but not by excluding people, based on their identity, from its protection.

That would be to gut it of its most sacred principle.
All of this must be seen in the context of the Chisinau process. 
The politically framed letter of the 9 and the joint statement of the 27, which is likely to result in a political declaration soon, has not been dialogue within the existing mechanisms, but an attempt at political influence over or interference in the European court and our own judicial system.

To link anti-migrant sentiment with such political proposals, dressed up as a solution to instability, scapegoats people and divides the good from the bad. That is more than a tinkering with Articles 8 or 3. It is a rejection of the Convention’s first Article, the duty to secure the Convention rights of everyone in their jurisdiction.

The Belfast Agreement applies to everyone in Northern Ireland, not the good ones, the self-sufficient ones or the legal ones.

As to the legality of any person’s place within Northern Ireland, it is impossible to assess just by looking at them. It is impossible to tell if they have a legal right to stay unless and until an assessment is made.

This current debate is about removing the obligation to even assess legality properly. Moreover, it will likely result in the less humane treatment of some people by virtue of their identity.

The potential consequences of not requiring humane treatment while a person is here, or of returning a person without a proper assessment of whether they will be tortured, or subject to inhuman or degrading treatment, are catastrophic. 
These can be, literally, life and death decisions.

If we try to reassure ourselves that the UK is so much more progressive and kinder than others in Europe and that our application of Article 3 is less forgiving than others, we should recall that we are not immune.

For example, see Ireland v the UK (known as the hooded men case), a number of other cases involving findings of breach of the right to life and the official report in relation to UK security force complicity in torture and mistreatment abroad.

This whole issue of rights and the peace agreement was returned to during the Brexit debate. Subsequent arrangements (underwritten by the UK and the EU) require the UK to ensure there is no diminution in NI of rights, safeguards and equality of opportunity as set out in the relevant part of the BGFA as a result of leaving the EU.

Releasing us from the full protection of the ECHR or the oversight of the Court cannot, in good faith, sit alongside the Belfast Agreement and the Windsor Framework.

Mister Justice Humphries found that removal of the duty to consider valid human rights claims without an assessment prior to removal is in breach of Article 3.

In the Commission’s own motion challenge to the Illegal Migration Act he made reference to the link between the ECHR and the breadth of rights protected in the Belfast Good Friday Agreement.

He said it was apparent that its provisions and protections were broad in scope. As part of it, the UK Government undertook to incorporate the full sweep of ECHR rights into the law of Northern Ireland and make them directly enforceable in the courts.

To conclude, a few basic points:
The commitment to universal human rights was supposed to be beyond the whim of the state, of whatever political persuasion or however politically expedient.

Likewise, the supervisory jurisdiction of the European Court. It has to be free to determine whether any state has discharged its international obligations, according to mutually agreed principles, regardless of strength, size, economic power or fluctuations in the will of the majority.

The prospect of global threats to national security is terrifying, but we know, because those at the head of the security services here tell us, that marginalisation and demonisation only make it worse.

Once you put in the hands of a state the power to determine or influence the rightness or wrongness of people, you imperil the very foundation of the Convention.

The PSNI managed an enormous security risk while also embracing a human rights approach to policing, which in their estimation has made them, as much as civilians, safer.

National security is best protected by a strict adherence to the full range of rights for the full range of people – that’s what they have demonstrated time and again.

During the history of the conflict, and throughout the post conflict arrangements, there remained a deficit of trust between people in Northern Ireland and the UK authorities.

Certainly, that was the case amongst the then minority nationalist community, but it was not exclusive to them.

They did not trust that the UK government would protect their rights, without external pressure and enforcement.

Peace is still not ‘done’ - it is an ongoing process – how can we contemplate disturbing its foundation?

Whomever you talk to, the ongoing challenge is acknowledged. The conflict continues to be dealt with in the courts.

The fact that the ECHR continues to play a central role in resolving the legacy of the conflict and maintaining the peace process is reason alone to protect it, but we are also inextricably connected to the rest of Europe and owe it to the 700 million odd people who will also lose.

In a poll in November 2025, it was shown that only 11% of people in Northern Ireland supported withdrawal from the ECHR – I think that shows how much we value it.

Northern Ireland has been supported internationally; we are still welcomed across the Council of Europe and the United Nations as the small place that has many lessons to share.

We should remember that, and really push the lessons we learned, the hard way.