UN CERD COMMITTEE CALLS FOR SWEEPING REFORMS OF IRELAND'S
ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAWS

In response to Ireland’s submission in 2018 of its 5th to 9th combined reports under the international Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CERD), the United Nations CERD Committee has called for what amounts to root and branch reforms of the legislative framework on discrimination in Ireland, including the Equal Status Acts, and for meaningful implementation and monitoring of anti-discrimination policies. Traveller Solidarity Alliance warmly welcomes the UN’s backing for reforms. The Alliance shares the UN’s dismay that Ireland has failed to incorporate the Convention into domestic law “and has no intention to do so”, and at the State’s continuing reservation on (i.e., refusal to adopt) Article 4, which condemns and prohibits by law racially motivated violence, the incitement of racial hatred, and the promotion of racial hatred by political parties, public authorities and institutions. The UN’s concluding observations demonstrate that Ireland fails to meet international human rights standards.

• Failure of the Equal Status Acts to conform with Article 1

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The UN Committee lists “shortcomings of the Equal Status Acts” which endorse the criticism of Ireland’s equality laws made by the Shadow Report submitted by Dr Anna Hoare. These shortcomings include “The absence of all prohibited grounds of racial discrimination in conformity with Article 1 of the Convention”. This is the most basic and fundamental requirement of national equality legislation. The prohibited grounds are: race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin.

This criticism validates the Shadow Report’s argument that the exemption of housing authorities in the Equal Status Acts from affording equal treatment to Travellers in regard to housing is in breach of international law. Travellers are the only ethnic group singled out and named by the Equal Status Acts who are excluded from legal protection from discrimination when it comes to housing. Travellers have long been treated as second class citizens by housing authorities, and the Equal Status Acts excluded housing authorities from its provisions by naming Travellers as ‘class of household’ who could be treated differently. Councils across Ireland commonly use quota systems for Travellers on housing waiting lists - often allocating one house in ten to a Traveller family – as well as using “designated Traveller houses”, which mark Travellers out as potential targets on housing estates. These practices are explicitly condoned by the existing legal framework. The Shadow Report by Dr Anna Hoare, submitted on the Traveller Solidarity Alliance platform, cites examples of the same discriminatory, “entrenched local practices” in current housing allocation policies that were criticised decades ago in the 1983 Report of the Travelling People Review Body.

The Shadow Report states: “the classification of Travellers as a “class of household” irrespective of specific housing needs in Housing Allocation Schemes; the exemption of housing authorities from affording Travellers equal treatment; and the use of rationing and “designated Traveller houses”, reflect attitudes from a time in Ireland’s history when internal segregation and explicit hierarchy were considered acceptable by the majority. In the 1950s and ‘60s, for example, condemned houses were sometimes given to Travellers to live in, because they were considered unfit for habitation. Ethnic rationing, segregation and hierarchy have no more place in contemporary Ireland than giving people condemned houses to live in.”

• Holding the State to account

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The Equal Status Acts come in for further criticism by the CERD Committee for failing to protect people from multiple or intersectional discrimination, and for an unclear definition of “services” which may exclude public authorities such as the police, prison and immigration services. The Committee further criticizes the exemption of court decisions from challenge on grounds of discrimination. The Committee calls on the State to amend the law on all these matters, and, crucially, to ensure “that an effective remedy is provided for discrimination that has a legislative basis”. At present, the CERD Convention cannot be invoked in the courts, because it is not incorporated into domestic law, and there is no clear route for someone who has suffered discrimination to bring a complaint against a State institution or private body through the court system. The State and the courts remain essentially unaccountable.

In its comments on policy and the institutional framework for the elimination of racial discrimination in Ireland, the CERD Committee calls on the Irish State “to ensure that no protection gaps exist in policy and institutional framework for any group of people experiencing racial discrimination”. As well as those areas cited above, this includes the restoration of legal aid for those who have suffered discrimination.

• Housing and the underspend

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The CERD Committee expresses concern at “reports that ethnic minority groups such as Travellers, Roma, people of African descent, and migrant communities, who have limited access to social housing, face serious discrimination and inequality in the competitive private rental sector and are disproportionately at risk of being homeless.” It calls for “effective measures” to prevent discrimination in the private rental sector, the Repeal of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2002 (aka the Trespass Act), and for Traveller evictions to be suspended. Importantly, the Committee recommends that the State increase the budget for Traveller accommodation to the levels before the financial crisis “and ensure that all of the allocated budget is fully and effectively spent.”

At present, although Travellers have a right under the Traveller Accommodation Act 1998 to choose sites as their preferred form of accommodation, nothing in law requires local authorities to provide them. This anomaly has become part of the growing scandal of social neglect. Travellers’ living conditions have deteriorated to increasingly dangerous levels of overcrowding, lack of basic services, and legal insecurity, with all the attendant risks and consequences to physical and mental health.

Further recommendations include the prohibition of racial profiling, and strengthening the law to prohibit racist hate speech (implementing Article 4). The Committee expressed concern about the absence of laws to ban racist organizations, and urged Ireland to “prosecute and punish acts of hate speech, including those committed by politicians during election campaigns.” This recommendation recognizes the Shadow Report’s criticism and examples of overt political manipulation of anti-Traveller racism, described by Dr Hoare: “inflammatory campaigning by local politicians against proposed sites is a time-worn, divisive technique that employs techniques similar to those used to force councils to retract offers of houses to qualified Traveller households in need of housing”.

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• Law and policies: Travellers and Roma

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The Committee noted that “no legal act” had followed the State's formal recognition of Travellers as an ethnic minority, and that no “concrete action plans” or “sufficient budget” had been allocated to implement the National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy. It called for “clear targets, indicators, outcomes, time frames and a budget line” and mechanisms to “monitor the implementation”.

With regard to economic, social and cultural rights, the Committee criticised the “absence of Traveller history and culture in school curricula and text books” in accordance with Article 5, and called for the “adoption of the Traveller Culture and History in Education Bill 2018 to be in line with the Convention and relevant international human rights standards.”

It also expressed concern about the lack of legal aid available to Travellers in areas of law particularly relevant to them, including racial discrimination.

• Little more than window dressing

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Author of the Shadow Report, Dr Hoare, welcomed the UN’s Concluding Observations.

“The UN CERD Committee clearly recognizes the multiple failures of Ireland’s human rights framework, and the State’s continued resistance to taking steps that would demonstrate determination to prohibit and combat racism, and to accept accountability for the discriminatory actions of its own bodies and institutions. Until the Convention is fully incorporated into Irish law, the courts are not bound to uphold it, and people who have suffered discrimination at the hands of the State have no avenue to seek legal redress in the courts. It is troubling that decisions of the courts themselves are exempt from legal challenge on grounds of discrimination. No one will appear in court on charges of racially motivated violence or for publishing incitement to racial violence, and politicians seeking election will carry on distributing racist leaflets and making racist speeches, unless Ireland adopts the Convention in its totality, including Article 4, and passes laws to enact it.

“When you read that the definition of racial discrimination in the Equal Status Acts does not conform with Article 1 of the CERD Convention, it calls into question the bona fides of the State. There is still a widespread attitude within government that Travellers constitute a separate category for whom special exclusions are justified. Ireland has been great at announcing strategies and action plans, setting up committees, and making symbolic declarations – there are several new ones on the go at any given moment, which give the illusion of action and intention – but what it doesn’t do is to actually incorporate international human rights standards through effective domestic laws that the courts must uphold. Until that happens the rest is little more than window dressing. Those who make laws and design policies must realize: racism costs lives. I hope all those whose lives are still blighted and cut short by discrimination, among whom generations of Travellers, across the board, have been the most seriously affected, will seek to join in solidarity with the growing number of Irish people who are ashamed of their country’s record.”

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Click on the links below to access the full UN Concluding Observations and Shadow Report.

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