Negotiations, 1998: Rights, Safeguards, Equality of Opportunity, para 5), has been resistant to articulating international human rights obligations as they pertain to abortion in Northern Ireland. In its 2008 guidance to the Secretary of State on the proposed content of a Bill of Rights for the jurisdiction, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) stated: The of women’s rights in respect of reproduction, and especially the issue of termination of pregnancy, has been one of the most controversial in the Commission’s consultations on a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland. Forceful and deeply felt submissions have been made, in respect of a right to life for unborn children and in respect of a right of choice for women. There is no clear widely accepted international standard in respect of the underlying (emphasis added) (NIHRC, 2008: 116) issues. In a small jurisdiction such as Northern Ireland, the actions and choice of priority issues of the NIHRC can be agenda-setting. Given their position’ between ‘unique government, civil society organisations and NGOs, the importance of the national or sub-national human rights institution in validating the human rights resonance of particular issues is considerable (Smith, 2006). Despite the specific recommendations by the CEDAW Committee in its previous Concluding Observations, the NIHRC made no reference to women’s reproductive rights or access to abortion in its 2008 Shadow Report to the Committee. The role of human rights advocacy in local and transnational settings in advancing the legal and normative development of human rights, in addition to human rights enforcement, is typically celebrated by scholars of such advocacy (see especially Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Such work appears to assume (implicitly at least) that the values underpinning human rights mobilization are progressive. These implicit assumptions are evident in the identification of transnational advocacy networks as constructed around consisting of actors motivated by a selfless ‘principled-issues’, commitment to social struggles of the disenfranchised, and the need to circumvent the recalcitrance or opposition of the violating state (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Findings from the Northern Irish case suggest that this assumption may not be entirely correct. While human rights advocacy networks coordinate around largely progressive agendas of individual rights and state accountability, the response of human rights NGOs to the CEDAW inquiry initiative reveals space within these larger narratives
Negotiations, 1998: Rights, Safeguards, Equality of Opportunity, para 5), has been resistant to articulating international human rights obligations as they pertain to abortion in Northern Ireland. In its 2008 guidance to the Secretary of State on the proposed content of a Bill of Rights for the jurisdiction, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) stated: The of women’s rights in respect of reproduction, and especially the issue of termination of pregnancy, has been one of the most controversial in the Commission’s consultations on a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland. Forceful and deeply felt submissions have been made, in respect of a right to life for unborn children and in respect of a right of choice for women. There is no clear widely accepted international standard in respect of the underlying issues. (emphasis added) (NIHRC, 2008: 116) In a small jurisdiction such as Northern Ireland, the actions and choice of priority issues of the NIHRC can be agenda-setting. Given their ‘unique position’ between government, civil society organisations and NGOs, the importance of the national or sub-national human rights institution in validating the human rights resonance of particular issues is considerable (Smith, 2006). Despite the specific recommendations by the CEDAW Committee in its previous Concluding Observations, the NIHRC made no reference to women’s reproductive rights or access to abortion in its 2008 Shadow Report to the Committee. The role of human rights advocacy in local and transnational settings in advancing the legal and normative development of human rights, in addition to human rights enforcement, is typically celebrated by scholars of such advocacy (see especially Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Such work appears to assume (implicitly at least) that the values underpinning human rights mobilization are progressive. These implicit assumptions are evident in the identification of transnational advocacy networks as constructed around ‘principled-issues’, consisting of actors motivated by a selfless commitment to social struggles of the disenfranchised, and the need to circumvent the recalcitrance or opposition of the violating state (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Findings from the Northern Irish case suggest that this assumption may not be entirely correct. While human rights advocacy networks coordinate around largely progressive agendas of individual rights and state accountability, the response of human rights NGOs to the CEDAW inquiry initiative reveals space within these larger narratives
Article%20for%20publication%2C%20Sept%2030%202015.docx