Pressure mounting to change law on abortion
THE GOVERNMENT is facing mounting pressure to reform abortion laws in Northern Ireland after Supreme Court judges said they were incompatible with human rights legislation.
Pro-choice campaigners demanded action after a majority of Supreme Court judges said the ban on terminations in cases of rape, incest or fatal foetal abnormality needed “radical reconsideration”.
While the majority of judges expressed a view that the current regime is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), they did not go so far as to make a formal declaration of incompatibility – a move that would probably have forced a law change.
That was essentially a legal technicality – a majority of judges ruled the organisation that brought the case did not have the authority to do so – and it did little to dampen calls for the Government to intervene and legislate in Northern Ireland amid the absence of devolved ministers due to the power-sharing impasse in Belfast.
But Downing Street insisted the judgment did not change its view that the issue should be dealt with by a restored devolved Assembly. Sarah Ewart, who in 2013 travelled from Northern Ireland to England after being told her baby would not survive outside the womb, was one of three cases referred to in the Supreme Court judgment.
“I, and we, will not stop until we can get our own medical care in our own hospitals at home,” she said outside court in London.
“To Theresa May, I would say, ‘We need change and help. This is a medical procedure that we need in our hospitals with our own medical team. Please help us now’.”
A majority of a seven-strong panel of Supreme Court justices ruled the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) had no legal standing to bring its challenge against the abortion law, and it could only have been brought by a woman impacted by the abortion ban.
Mrs Ewart intends to take a case to the High Court in Belfast to seek the formal declaration of incompatibility that the Supreme Court declined to grant on Thursday.
“I am relieved to hear the highest court in the land has recognised that Northern Ireland is in breach of human rights for people who find themselves with fatal foetal abnormality and have said that the law needs to be changed, so we will keep going until we get that change,” she said.
Speaking outside court, NIHRC chief commissioner Les Allamby said: “Northern Ireland is a wonderful place to both live and work yet it is in danger of becoming a place apart in human rights and equality that is not good for Northern Ireland and not good for the UK Government, which rightly projects its human rights and equality standards across the world, to have a backslider in its own back yard. In the absence of a Northern Ireland assembly and executive, we must ask Parliament to take our laws out of the 19th century and bring them into the 21st century.”