More than two years have elapsed since the devolved power sharing institutions provided for under the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) collapsed in Northern Ireland. Additionally, many of the rights based commitments of the peace settlement, including those originally designed as to act as safeguards on the NI Executive and Assembly, remain unimplemented or have been...

Working with Conradh na Gaeilge and Ulster University, we have produced a report documenting how commitments made by the UK government in relation to the Irish language have been put into practice by councils in Northern Ireland. Local councils have an important role to play in fulfilling state duties in relation to the Irish language....

Since the EU referendum, the UK government has consistently emphasised that the ‘associated rights’ of the Common Travel Area (CTA) between the UK and Ireland will provide British and Irish citizens with reciprocal rights across the two jurisdictions after Brexit. However, independent legal analysis has highlighted that, in several areas, rights for Irish citizens in...

Only Irish citizens who are not also British citizens can apply under the EU Settlement Scheme for long-term protection of their rights, according to the Home Office Minister Caroline Nokes in her response to a Parliamentary Question tabled by Labour MP John Grogan. Under the current Home Office position that Northern Ireland-born people should be...

Periodically, the UK is reviewed for its compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which it ratified in 1986. Through ratifying the treaty, the UK committed itself to taking action to end discrimination against women. The eighth periodic review of the UK is currently in progress. On...

When: 10am-4pm, Monday 4 March 2019. Where: Moot Court Room, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast. This one-day conference from BrexitLawNI and the Equality Coalition will examine the risks of hardened entitlement boundaries between different groups of citizens in post-Brexit Northern Ireland. The existing paradigm of two main citizenship categories (EU and non-EU) will be...

In Northern Ireland, abortion is regulated by outdated legislation, including Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences against the Person Act, 1861. Abortion is only lawful where necessary to preserve the life of the pregnant woman or where there is a risk of real and serious adverse effects on the woman’s physical or mental health,...

CAJ Director Brian Gormally appeared today before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice and Equality to discuss the issues and potential risks raised by Brexit in terms of human rights and equality in Ireland. Attending the same meeting were representatives of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) and the Irish Human Rights and Equality...

CAJ highlights another year spent promoting justice and protecting rights in our Annual Report 2018. It’s been an eventful twelve months for the CAJ team, not least because of the human rights implications of the UK’s impending exit from the EU. Introduction to the report: People in Northern Ireland are sometimes accused, not always unjustly,...

When: 11am to 1pm, Tuesday 11 December 2018 Where: UNISON, Galway House, Belfast As part of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Festival 2018, the Equality Coalition invite to you to a panel discussion on the increasingly hostile environment faced by human rights defenders. Online abuse, trolling and threats have become common place in the digital...