Today marks the date in 1992 when the parents of a pregnant 14-year-old took their daughter to England for an abortion. She had been raped by a friend of the family. That same day in the High Court, Mr Justice Declan Costello issued a temporary injunction to prevent the abortion. Only hours after they had [...]

Last Friday, I heard Joe Jones of the Gypsy Council speak about his organisation’s history beforeDale Farm.  In passing - we weren’t talking about Ireland at all - he mentioned the names Grattan Puxon and Cherry Orchard and, not having any idea what he was referring to, I made a note to Google both. I never [...]

The news reports in Friday’s papers, if any, on the launch on Thursday of the Report of the Gender Recognition Advisory Group will certainly contain the news that the law will be changed to allow transgendered people have their new gender legally recognised in Ireland. They might also contain information on concerns that have been [...]

Human trafficking is always a popular news item, but the coinciding of a number of stories about it over the past fortnight has raised an interesting point that usually gets lost in the hysteria: the ambiguity of the term itself, and how it can easily be stretched or narrowed to cover or exclude certain phenomena, [...]

Transgression of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is considered a serious breach of freedom. Citing national interest and security, political leaders are inundating their citizens with a xenophobic and racist rant which is void of ideology, instead reflecting prejudice with the premise of leaders being in harmony with the people.
Conveniently forgetting that humanity is [...]

How will the political parties Make Their Mark for the Equality and Human Rights Infrastructure?
Here is ERA’s poll of the manifestos. A more in-depth analysis is available here (PDF).
Only three of the five parties make any broad statement about equality & human rights

Sinn Fein:
The current system is not fit for purpose. It has [...]

The fifth report on Ireland from the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Degrading Treatment (CPT), published today, is the most critical yet, and a damning indictment of a prison system that is failing to meet the most basic human rights standards of safe and humane custody. The Irish Penal Reform [...]

Up to 50,000 people a day die from poverty related causes with 22,000 of these fatalities being children under the age of five. The plight of the world’s most impoverished and vulnerable people have been further aggravated by the current global financial and food crises. According to the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), [...]

The Human Rights In Ireland blog has a ‘blog carnival’ on at the moment around civil disobedience and its policing in Ireland that should be of interest to readers of ILR.
Vicky Conway provides an introduction and the context for the carnival:
“There are many reasons for hosting a blog carnival this week on civil disobedience and [...]

Over on humanrights.ie ILR contributor Illan rua Wall has put up a very interesting and wide-ranging podcast interview with Wendy Brown; the Heller Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkley.
About the interview, which was recorded earlier in September, Illan writes:
Prof. Brown engages initially with the question of critique, and its relation to [...]