Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC, a prominent Irish barrister working in London, has warned the UK risks breaching the Good Friday Agreement if the Conservative government follows through with its planned repeal of the Human Rights Act following Brexit in March 2019.

Speaking on Friday at The Common Law and Brexit: A New Frontier seminar in UCD’s Sutherland School of Law, Ms Gallagher addressed what she described as Westminster’s “blind spot on Northern Ireland”.

“Northern Ireland is quite plainly an afterthought for the UK government”, she said, contrasting the early and detailed focus on Northern Ireland by the Irish government and EU with the response of the UK government to the ramifications of Brexit for the North.

In particular, Ms Gallagher noted that the UK’s move away from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) with the expected repeal of the Human Rights Act would “probably” signal a breach of the Good Friday Agreement, but that it depended on what the British government intended to replace it with.

Commenting on the Conservatives’ intention to replace the Human Rights Act with a “British Charter of Fundamental Rights”, Ms Gallagher stated that unless the Charter reinstated the same rights as protected by the ECHR, the Good Friday Agreement would be breached.

She noted that discussions in Conservative circles about such a Charter have focused on reducing the scope of the ECHR, which suggests that the move would in fact breach the historic peace agreement.

It was noted, however, that the Good Friday Agreement has in the past withstood similar breaches of its terms. Dr Catherine Donnelly, an associate professor in Trinity College Dublin, pointed to the failure to establish a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland as required by the Agreement despite a lengthy consultation process.

Ms Gallagher highlighted the flawed conflation of EU membership with the ECHR in the pro-Brexit press throughout the referendum campaign. Decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, a supranational court founded in 1959, were often confused with decisions of the highest court in the EU, the European Court of Justice. The result was that anti-ECHR sentiment became part and parcel of a wider anti-EU movement.

This comes in the latest of concerns for the stability of Northern Ireland following a British withdrawal from the European Union.

Kevin Burns, Irish Legal News