should compo be paid when no law is broken?

recedite wrote: »

I agree with this. The UN HR committee has no power to make Ireland pay compensation, it can merely "communicate its views" and "put pressure" on Ireland.
It is then up to the Irish govt. to decide what they want to do.

We have seen previously regarding the issue of religious discrimination against children in school admission policies, a UN committee attempted to put similar pressure on Ireland, but they were largely ignored. And certainly no compensation has ever been paid to any child who was refused a place in their nearest school on the grounds that they were the wrong religion.

No, there’s a difference.

The second case was the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child commenting, in one of its periodic reports, on Ireland’s school patronage arrangements. ThAT Committee was sent up by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty to which Ireland is a party, and the Convention gives it the function of examining and commenting on the implementation of the Convention in the states which are party to it, through a regular series of reports.

It has no role in considering individual complaints, or in recommending remedies.

By contrast, the Human Rights Committee does have such a role, but only in relation to those states which specifically sign up to the arrangement - it’s a kind of “optional extra” under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Of 169 states which have ratified the Covenant, 116 (including Ireland) Jhave signed up to give the Committee this additional function of investigating individual complaints and recommending remedies.

And, while those states aren't bound to provide the remedies suggested by the Committee, they are bound to remedy breaches which occur. They can provide different remedies if they wish, but its rare for them not to provide the recommended remedies, except by agreement with the complainants in the case concerned.

recedite wrote: »

That wasn't quite my suggestion. I was saying that the concept of having an international body like the UN ruling on human rights issues is to reprimand regimes who disregard human rights, but at the same time don't admit that they are doing anything wrong.

No, it isn’t. It’s to investigate individual complaints of breaches of Covenant rights, make findings and recommend remedies.

recedite wrote: »

It does not make sense for a regime to agree with the reprimand, pay up the compensation, and then continue with the same "wrongful" behaviour (ie failing to provide the abortion services).

It makes even less sense for a regime both to pay no remedy and to continue with the same behaviour, and for the whole issue to be parked until there is regime change.

recedite wrote: »

What the govt. have done here is to create a new legal anomaly, which in turn could lead to the ECHR getting involved again on the grounds that there is no longer any legal clarity in the specific situation of abortion for cases of fatal foetal abnormality. That is a serious mistake by the govt.

The legal anomaly doesn’t arise from the payment of compensation, but from the mismatch between the provisions of domestic law and/or government policy on the one hand, and the international obligations which Ireland has undertaken by ratifying the Convention on Civil and Political Rights. That problem doesn’t go away if Ireland refused to provide recommended remedies to those whose Convestion rights have been breached. You may be correct to say that action is required to resolve the mismatch, but refusal to provide remedies is definitely not that action.

recedite wrote: »

Correct, yes. The European Court of Justice is the one that all EU members are bound by. But in practice, the Court of Justice "weaves the Convention principles throughout its reasoning". So if a member state dodged one of the ECHR rulings, the injured party would inevitably haul the member state up before the ECJ, which would almost certainly deliver the same verdict, but in a more binding way.

The EU is a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, and as you correctly note the EU courts do give effect to Convention rights in their decisions.

But that doesn’t mean that you can take any breach of the Convention to the ECJ. If you have a case arising under EU law, you can go to the ECJ (if you need to), and if the facts of that case happen to give rise to issues to which the Convention is relevant, then the Convention will be applied.

But you don’t have to go to the ECJ, or try and frame your complaint so that it gives rise to issues of EU law, to enforce your Convention rights. Whether or not any aspect of EU law is involved, if you feel your Convention rights have been breached and you have not been able to vindicate them in the domestic courts, then you can go straight to the ECHR.

(Except, of course, that to go to the ECHR you have to first of all exhaust your domestic remedies. So if you start off in the national courts with a case that does in fact raise an issue of EU law that the national court feels it can't resolve, and the national court sends your case off to the ECJ, you have to follow that process through to its conclusion before the ECHR will hear you.)

Brexit will not change this in the UK (although there has been a fairly widespread misconception or assumption that it will).

(In fact, direct recourse to the ECHR shouldn’t often be necessary for people with complaints in the UK, since the UK has incorporated the Convention into its domestic law, and it's directly enforceable in the UK courts. (And, again, Brexit won’t change this.) This didn’t used to be the case; at one time the UK had a terrible record of being hauled before the ECHR and losing because, unlike most other parties to the Convention, it had no domestic human rights enforcement mechanisms that citizens could invoke, which mean that the only place you could find a remedy was in the ECHR. If I recall correctly, there were more adverse findings against the UK than against all other Council of Europe states put together. This wasn’t because the UK had an appalling record of breaching human rights; it was because it had an appalling record of providing remedies for breaches when the occurred. But that all changed with the Human Rights Act in the UK.)