Legal Defense Fund Travels to Ireland

In May, the Legal Defense Fund’s work reached the Emerald Isle – Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Earlier in the year, Dessie Donnelly, the campaigns director for a Belfast-based group known as the Participation and Practice of Rights Project (PPR), approached Thomas Linzey, CELDF’s Executive Director, about speaking at a Dublin conference sponsored by the group. After each learned more about the work of their respective organizations, the two groups decided to expand the trip to include a mini-Democracy School to be held a couple of days after the conference.

The concept behind PPR was launched in June of 2001 by Inez McCormack, who was then serving as the president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. She convened a planning group, composed of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Community Foundation Northern Ireland, and other organizations in both Ireland and Northern Ireland, to initiate a debate around the need for greater governmental participation and assertion of people’s rights. Bringing together academics, lawyers and international experts with “ordinary” people from local communities, PPR began building an organizing model focused on defining and enforcing international human rights at the community level. Known as the “human rights based approach,” PPR’s work seeks to “turn needs into rights,” promote governmental accountability, empower people by helping them to claim and enforce rights, while including particularly vulnerable groups in their organizing.

The Legal Defense Fund’s work of creating local rights frameworks which can then be enforced by local communities and municipalities holds particular appeal for the group as PPR seeks to expand their rights-based work within the country. It offers the promise of strengthening the work in Ireland through leveraging municipal governments as enforcers of rights, while expanding enforceable rights to include local ones, as well as those recognized by international rights agreements.

The Dundalk (just north of Dublin) conference was attended by over two hundred people, representing groups as diverse as Sinn Fein (once the political arm of the IRA) to the Human Rights Consortium (lobbying for a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights). The keynote speaker at the conference was Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland. Other speakers included an Indian human rights activist and an English lawyer specializing in governmental procurement as a way to advance the human rights agenda. Thomas Linzey presented for the Legal Defense Fund, giving a short history of the rights-based organizing approach in the United States and then fielding questions from groups interested in replicating the work.

Following the Dundalk conference, Thomas Linzey and the Legal Defense Fund’s Associate Director, Mari Margil, delivered a five hour Democracy School in Belfast to PPR staff, members of Ireland’s Human Rights Consortium, and members of Belfast’s labor unions. For twelve years, groups have lobbied and organized for a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights. The drafting and adoption of a Bill of Rights was included in the Good Friday Agreement which was signed in 1998 (through which Northern Ireland was granted greater autonomy), but little progress has been made on agreeing to the content of, or timeline for, that Bill of Rights.

Given that impasse, the Legal Defense Fund suggested that the groups working on the country-wide Northern Ireland Bill of Rights begin to move community bills of rights at the local level. As they codify bills of rights within individual municipalities, they are increasing the pressure for a national Bill of Rights.
The Legal Defense Fund’s work – drafting local bills of rights within municipal ordinances across the United States – may offer a strategic model for that work.

Following an organizational strategy meeting in August, PPR will be discussing next steps with the Legal Defense Fund for both enhancing their work with local communities as well as using some new strategic organizing models to accelerate the adoption of a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights.

Our work in Ireland follows on the heels of applying the Legal Defense Fund’s rights-based organizing approach in Ecuador and Canada. Additional inquiries to the Legal Defense Fund have been made from Australia, England, Indonesia, and Mexico.