David Quinn
Government only taking ruling seriously because it adds weight to demands for repeal of the Eighth Amendment, writes David Quinn
As most people will know by now, Ireland has been found guilty by the UN Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) of breaching its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which it is a signatory.
A woman – Amanda Mellet – brought a complaint before the UNHRC. Some years ago she had been told by doctors that the baby she was carrying had Trisomy 18 – a genetic defect – and would not live long past birth, if the child made it even that far.
Under Irish law she could not have an abortion because Irish law will only permit abortion when a woman’s life is in danger and Amanda Mellet’s life was not in danger.
Deciding she did not want to bring the baby to term and let nature take its course, she and her husband instead opted to travel to England for an abortion and the abortion took place during the 23rd week of pregnancy. She had been told only two weeks before that her child had Trisomy 18, also known as Edwards Syndrome.
Support
It is worth noting that children born with Edwards Syndrome can survive much longer than a few days after birth.
The website of the Trisomy 18 Foundation states: “Some infants will be able to survive to be discharged from the hospital with home nursing support to assist with care by the parents. And although 10% or more may survive to their first birthdays, there are children with Trisomy 18 that can enjoy many years of life with their families, reaching milestones and being involved with their community.”
Therefore, it is extremely misleading to describe Trisomy 18 as a “fatal foetal abnormality”. This is a highly emotive and dehumanising term for a group of people who have the great misfortune to suffer from a genetic defect, but are as human as you or I in every morally significant way.
When we condone the killing of unborn babies diagnosed with a severe defect we are saying that children with life-threatening disabilities are legally and morally inferior to their healthy counterparts and can be treated accordingly. To put it mildly, such a proposition is very ethically problematic.
That is not how the UNHRC sees it, however. In its finding last week against Ireland it declared: “A woman in Ireland who was forced to choose between carrying her foetus to term, knowing it would not survive, or seeking an abortion abroad was subjected to discrimination and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as a result of Ireland’s legal prohibition of abortion.”
(Note the certainty with which it declared the baby would not survive. That kind of certainty does not exist in reality).
It added: Ireland “is obliged to provide AM [Amanda Mellet] with an effective remedy, including adequate compensation and psychological treatment she may need. Ireland is also obliged to prevent similar violations from occurring.”
In other words, we must weaken the protection our Constitution gives to unborn children, including severely disabled unborn children.
The finding against Ireland received huge media coverage. That alone is very telling. The UNHRC regularly finds against countries on a whole host of issues, but the media in most countries give such findings scant coverage as a rule. That is because the media in most countries do not take findings by UN committees as seriously as we do, especially when the finding involves an issue – in this case abortion – so dearly beloved of our media.
It might be argued that our media have it right and the media in other Western countries have it wrong. That depends on how seriously we should take committees such as the UN Human Rights Committee, and the answer to that is that we should not take it as seriously as we are in this instance.
Apparent
It has been very apparent for a long-time now that the various UN committees that oversee implementation of the various UN human rights treaties are extremely ideologically loaded.
They operate hand-in-glove with left-wing NGOs in the countries under examination and help those NGOs to drive their domestic agendas.
Crucially, the findings of these committees are not legally binding.
In this regard, the case of Joseph Kavanagh is very instructive. At the turn of the century, the UNHRC found that the decision to try Kavanagh before the non-jury Special Criminal Court contravened his right to equality before the law. The State failed to grant him redress as demanded by the UNHRC and his case found his way to the Supreme Court in a case called ‘Joseph Kavanagh V the Governor of Mountjoy Prison and the Attorney General’.
The Supreme Court ruled against him and categorically declared that the findings of the UNHRC have no legal force in Ireland.
Indeed, it said: “The notion that the ‘views’ of a committee even of admittedly distinguished experts on international human rights experts, though not necessarily lawyers, could prevail against the concluded decision of a properly constituted court is patently unacceptable.”
So in the Kavanagh case the Irish State (both the Government and the Supreme Court) was absolutely prepared to disregard a finding of the UNHRC, but in the Mellet case the State is treating the finding with the greatest solemnity and gravity.
That cannot be due to the State regarding the UNHRC’s word as law, or even because it thinks its word has enormous moral weight. If that was the case, it would have given Joseph Kavanagh redress in 2000 when the committee found in his favour. But it did not, because it did not agree with the finding on that occasion and therefore it disregarded it and when Kavanagh took his case to the Supreme Court, it found against him and also disregarded the UNHRC.
So why is the UNHRC being taken so seriously this time? The answer is obvious; it suits us. It adds momentum to demands for the Eighth (Life Equality) Amendment to the Constitution to be repealed. It influences the public mood in the desired way.
On this occasion, therefore, we are happy to indulge in the pretence that these committees are utterly objective and have no agenda other than the truth.
We are happy in this case to pretend that they do not interpret the various treaties through a particular ideological filter and that they are not allied to like-minded NGOs in the various countries.
If the Government was not inclined towards recommending a referendum to repeal the Eighth, it would ignore this finding in the same way a previous Government ignored the Kavanagh finding.
But because it is inclined to repeal the Eighth, it is going along with the pretence that the UNHRC is a body possessed of huge moral authority.