#Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC)

[coochiequeens]

The some country that tuned a blind eye to while the nuns who ran the Madgelian Laundries buried babies in unmarked graves are now turning a blind eye to babies being created in war zones while their birth mothers are being exploited

Ireland’s new surrogacy law is legalising the sale of children

The human rights watchdog says our new health act allows for the trafficking of women and babies, but the health minister is ignoring its warning

Brenda Power Sunday September 22 2024

Despite the war, Ukraine’s baby factories are still flourishing. One of the biggest global players in the commercial surrogacy business is the Swiss-registered BioTexCom, which controls 70 per cent of the Ukrainian market and a quarter of the global business. Commercial surrogacy is estimated to have pumped €1.5 billion into the Ukrainian economy since 2018 alone, and the international market for surrogate babies, with an estimated value of €12.5 billion in 2022, has been growing at a rate of 25 per cent a year.

About half of Ukraine’s estimated 2,500 annual surrogate pregnancies are carried out through BioTexCom and, in the first 11 months of the war, the company reported that about 600 couples had travelled to the country to use its services. At approximately €50,000 per surrogacy, that means BioTexCom took in about €30 million in that period alone. A Kyiv clinic reported last year that the war hadn’t stopped Irish couples travelling for surrogacy services, and customers from Germany, Britain and Italy have also ensured that business remains brisk in these baby factories.

Under the new Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Act 2024, which passed all stages in the Oireachtas in May and was signed into law in July, Ireland is the first EU country to legalise commercial surrogacy. That’s not me saying this, by the way. That’s the view of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC), in its report on human trafficking published last week.

The commission is “concerned” that section 8 of the act, which covers international surrogacy, effectively extends the Irish legislation “to a practice not permitted in any other EU state, in an area marred with increasing human trafficking”. It also fears that this new Irish law “may thwart other countries’ efforts to protect their own citizens from trafficking and reproductive exploitation”. We are, in other words, about to become legally complicit in the trafficking of women for the purposes of providing babies to Irish couples.

The commission has written twice to Stephen Donnelly, the health minister, pointing out that the law does not fulfil the state’s obligations under EU law to prevent the trafficking of women for exploitative surrogacy. At the date of drafting its report, the commission said, no response had been received.

The exploitation of vulnerable women for surrogacy, the commission says, is “one of the most concerning, novel and emerging forms of trafficking”. Yet we have enacted a law that legalises what the UN special rapporteur on human rights has called “the sale of children”.

The new law creates a “double standard”, according to the commission, whereby domestic, “altruistic” surrogacy is tightly regulated but the international market will be subject to “light touch” regulation. There will be no way to ensure that other states will comply with the requirements of the act, for example that the surrogate mother is paid only “reasonable expenses” and is allowed a 21-day period to withdraw her consent to the arrangement.

This will certainly put Ukrainian law at odds with the new Irish position, since one Ukrainian clinic boasts on its 2024 page: “Legal requirements are not strict. Ukraine surrogacy law is clear that the gestational carrier has no parental rights over the child and she has no ability to keep the child.” This, in theory, will make Ukrainian surrogacy deals illegal.

And the idea that the foreign surrogate mother and the surrogacy agencies should receive only “reasonable expenses” is dismissed as disingenuous nonsense by the commission: “It is unlikely that a woman would undertake a pregnancy on behalf of a stranger from another country without being offered a significant incentive. It is a fiction to suggest otherwise, but that appears to be the basis on which the legislation is to operate.”

The “reasonable expenses” provision might, the commission warns, encourage Irish couples to seek surrogacy in poor and underdeveloped countries where surrogacy is permissible, including Kenya, Malaysia and Nigeria, and where they can get away with paying buttons to the surrogate mother on the basis of comparative economic value. And that would amount to a commercial advantage, making the surrogacy illegal — not that the new law will be able to do anything to prevent it.

That Ukrainian clinic (“We build families with love”) also offers “good genetic testing facilities and gender selection, just in case wishful parents want high success rates”. Here’s how the commission addresses this delicately phrased service: “While there is no large-scale data, surrogate mothers have reported undergoing forced abortions of foetuses unwanted by clients … There are also consistent reports from India, Nepal, Thailand and now Ukraine of client parents abandoning unwanted children, particularly those with disabilities.”

Just recently, says the commission, eight people were arrested at the Mediterranean Fertility Institute in Greece, which had advertised its services and its “excellent surrogate support programme” on the Growing Families website. Vulnerable women had been lured from Albania and Georgia on false pretences and “forced to undergo hormonal treatment, egg extraction and insemination for surrogacy”. Or, to put it another way, they were abducted and impregnated against their will so that wealthy western couples could buy their babies.

And that, in a nutshell, is what our human rights watchdog has been trying to warn the minister for health about; this is what it is telling him will be the consequence of his new law on surrogacy. And he has been ignoring the warnings and refusing to respond to the correspondence. For some reason, this chilling chapter in the IHREC report was also ignored in media coverage of its launch last week. We are about to legalise commercial surrogacy, in a market where women are being trafficked and raped to maintain a global business worth in excess of €20 billion annually. You may well support that measure, but you should understand it first.

Transparency is the best weapon

Gardai were called to a brawl this month outside a supermarket in west Dublin. Within hours, social media sites were buzzing with claims that the protagonist was an immigrant male, armed with a knife attacking schoolchildren — pictures purporting to be the violent attacker also appeared online. Later in the week, gardai issued a statement denying that the incident involved an adult male or a foreign national — all the participants were school students and Irish nationals, and the incident was contained within the school. Not that any of the online agitators believed a word of it and for that, arguably, the gardai have only themselves to blame.

Last week, gardai applied for reporting restrictions preventing the identification of a man accused of attempting to abduct a five-year-old boy during a party at a Dublin apartment building. Because of “the current climate in the country”, a garda told the court, and “the sensitive nature of the case”, it was preferable that the accused should not be identified. The judge at that hearing agreed, citing the “social media-fuelled climate we live in”.

How to tell the country that the accused was an immigrant, then, without telling the country that the accused was an immigrant, notionally putting every non-national in the dock and guaranteeing heightened interest in the case. When a number of media organisations quite properly challenged this decision, another judge partially lifted the restriction to name the individual but not his address. The obligation to dispense justice in public is a pillar of democracy, and is also a crucial element of the social contract; the public should also be able to trust that the prosecutions of both immigrants and nationals are being reported on as far as possible.

Social media is already awash with unfounded claims that the traditional media, gardai and the courts are conspiring to conceal the number of immigrants and asylum seekers before the courts. But at a time when transparency and reason are the best weapons against extremist agitation, unnecessarily constraining court reporting restrictions can only serve to alarm even the most moderate observers

[asylum-ireland-blog]

Conference Summary: Beyond McMahon – the Future of Asylum Reception in Ireland

New Post has been published on https://asylumireland.ml/conference-summary-beyond-mcmahon-the-future-of-asylum-reception-in-ireland/

Conference Summary: Beyond McMahon – the Future of Asylum Reception in Ireland

We are pleased to release the summary of our recent conference, ‘Beyond McMahon – the Future of Asylum Reception in Ireland’, which took place on 25 April, 2018.

A joint venture by Nasc and UCC’s Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights (CCJHR), the conference aimed to explore the future of and alternatives to the Irish asylum reception system three years after the publication of the McMahon Report (2015). The summary aims to provide a brief overview of the points raised during the conference, both for those who couldn’t make it, and for those who attended.

We would like to thank all of our guest speakers and audience members for their contributions. Special thanks goes to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) for funding the project.

Access to the conference summary can be found here.

The post Conference Summary: Beyond McMahon – the Future of Asylum Reception in Ireland appeared first on Nasc Ireland.

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[themuddypeacock]

For the Irish, of all people, who are the first to say how badly they’ve been treated throughout history by people inside and outside of their own country... FFS. 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️ . . . . . . . . . . From the Irish Times today: first two paragraphs: “Almost half of Irish adults believe “some cultures are superior to others” while almost 20 per cent believe “some races/ethnic groups are born less intelligent”, a landmark study on attitudes to race finds. The study published on Thursday by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) also finds just under 45 per cent of adults believe some races are “born harder working”. https://ift.tt/2IeB2aP

[celticzone]

Statement: Successful completion of Equality Budgeting Campaign The Equality Budgeting campaign, set up in 2012 to seek reforms to the budget process, is today announcing its cessation. Having achieved its main goal of a government commitment to Equality Budgeting, the campaign is happy to hand over the reins of Equality Budgeting to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, which is tasked, in the current Programme for Government, with implementing Equality Budgeting. We are proud of the achievements of the campaign, which introduced the concept of Equality Budgeting to the Irish political landscape, and highlighted the closed nature of Irish budgets and the inequitable impact this was having on specific sections of Irish society. The campaign engaged in several, high-impact activities: - Private Members Bill to give effect to Equality Budgeting in the Dail in June 2013. The Equal Status (Amendment) Bill 2013 was introduced by Sinn Fein and supported by all members of the opposition, although not by the government parties. Full text of the bill available here:http://ift.tt/2yL0RhQ - organising a seminar on equality budgeting in the NWCI on 20th April 2013 (which included participation of the Scottish Women's Budget Group and the Equality Coalition of Northern Ireland to learn from the Northern Irish and Scottish models of embedding equality in budgetary processes there - presentations can be viewed on the campaign's YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsH0sRlk-_VNYZEcBJmsPvg) -collation of an Information Booklet on Equality Budgeting, supported by funding from the Equality Commission, as well as submissions to government ministers and public consultations (see e.g. here: http://ift.tt/2gGDawu) - the campaign built considerable support from elected representatives, who signed a pledge for a "fair slice" through equality budgeting in September 2013 (supporters included Labour backbenchers, and members from the opposition parties - see photos of the photo stunt and the pledge board here: http://ift.tt/2idcIOM) - in October 2013 and 2014, we held a post-budget event with over 50 civil society organisations in the Mansion House, undertook a survey, and collated the resultant research (see report attached) - invited presentations to two Dail committees (on petitions, and on social protection), with the latter resulting in a study visit by the committee to Scotland to learn more about Equality Budgeting there - numerous media engagement activities, including articles in The Irish Times, the Journal.ie and similar outlets - submission and representation of the campaign at a hearing on women's human rights by the UN CEDAW committee in 2017, the first such examination of Ireland to take place in over a decade (read the submission here: http://ift.tt/2gGDaN0) We are delighted that the Equality Budgeting Campaign has been instrumental in prompting a serious overhaul of the Irish budgeting system, which includes the setting up of a Budget Office and an Oireachtas committee on budgetary scrutiny. We hope that this work will now be continued by IHREC to ensure equality-focused budgeting, including impact assessments and evidence-based policy-making that will ensure a more equitable Ireland. We thank all of the organisations and individuals who have made the work of the campaign possible over the last number of years. http://ift.tt/2yL0RhQ

[asylum-ireland-blog]

Nasc and UCC’s Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights host conference on direct provision alternatives

New Post has been published on https://asylumireland.ml/nasc-and-uccs-centre-for-criminal-justice-and-human-rights-host-conference-on-direct-provision-alternatives/

Nasc and UCC’s Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights host conference on direct provision alternatives

Nasc, the Migrant and Refugee Rights Centre, in conjunction with the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights (CCJHR) at University College Cork’s School of Law are hosting an important conference looking at the future of asylum reception in Ireland.  The conference will be held this Wednesday 25th April 2018, from 9am – 2pm in Lecture Theatre 107, Western Gateway Building, UCC.

The conference, titled “Beyond McMahon – the future of asylum reception in Ireland”, will examine the Irish asylum reception system (‘direct provision’) and explore potential alternatives, three years on from the publication of the McMahon Report of the Working Group on the Protection Process and Direct Provision.  A copy of the full Conference Programme is available here.

Dr. Bryan McMahon, who chaired the Working Group in 2014-2015, will provide the Keynote Address. The conference will also include important input from the heads of the Scottish and Portuguese Refugee Councils, Mr. Sabir Zazai and Mrs. Teresa Mendes respectively, as well as Eugene Banks, Principal Officer in charge of the Reception and Integration Agency, which oversees the direct provision system.

Other contributors include: Enda O’Neill, Head of Office at UNHCR; Stephen Ng’ang’a, Core Group of Asylum Seekers; Luke Hamilton, Irish Refugee Council; Lucky Khambule, Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland; Dr. Liam Thornton, Lecturer, UCD School of Law; Adedeola Akinbote and Adebola Babalola, two current residents in direct provision; and Fiona Hurley, Legal Services Manager at Nasc.  In addition, Chief Commissioner of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Emily Logan will be moderating a panel discussion on the future of asylum reception.

Nasc CEO Fiona Finn comments:

“The Government committed to implement the recommendations from the McMahon Report and improve the protection process and direct provision. However, three years on and there are significant backlogs in the process and very little has changed for asylum seekers.  It is essential that we look beyond direct provision and start to imagine what a truly respectful and humane protection and reception system could look like. This conference is a critical first step in that process.”

Dr. Dug Cubie, Deputy Director of UCC’s Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights comments:

“As a newly recognised University of Sanctuary, we are delighted to welcome this truly illustrious line up of speakers coming from a range of perspectives to discuss alternatives to the current system. It will be incredibly useful to hear from Mr. Zazai and Mrs. Mendes how asylum reception works in Scotland and Portugal, and what we can learn from other European contexts.  It is also a great opportunity for our students to take part in this conversation, and learn how academia can support advocacy.”

IHREC Chief Commissioner Ms. Emily Logan notes:

“This is a very important and timely conference, especially given the numbers of people displaced globally, and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission is delighted to support and take part in this discussion.”

The conference is funded through the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Human Rights and Equality Grant Scheme.

ENDS.

For media contact details, please click here

  The post Nasc and UCC’s Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights host conference on direct provision alternatives appeared first on Nasc Ireland.

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[celticzone]

Statement: Successful completion of Equality Budgeting Campaign The Equality Budgeting campaign, set up in 2012 to seek reforms to the budget process, is today announcing its cessation. Having achieved its main goal of a government commitment to Equality Budgeting, the campaign is happy to hand over the reins of Equality Budgeting to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, which is tasked, in the current Programme for Government, with implementing Equality Budgeting. We are proud of the achievements of the campaign, which introduced the concept of Equality Budgeting to the Irish political landscape, and highlighted the closed nature of Irish budgets and the inequitable impact this was having on specific sections of Irish society. The campaign engaged in several, high-impact activities: - Private Members Bill to give effect to Equality Budgeting in the Dail in June 2013. The Equal Status (Amendment) Bill 2013 was introduced by Sinn Fein and supported by all members of the opposition, although not by the government parties. Full text of the bill available here:http://ift.tt/2yL0RhQ - organising a seminar on equality budgeting in the NWCI on 20th April 2013 (which included participation of the Scottish Women's Budget Group and the Equality Coalition of Northern Ireland to learn from the Northern Irish and Scottish models of embedding equality in budgetary processes there - presentations can be viewed on the campaign's YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsH0sRlk-_VNYZEcBJmsPvg) -collation of an Information Booklet on Equality Budgeting, supported by funding from the Equality Commission, as well as submissions to government ministers and public consultations (see e.g. here: http://ift.tt/2gGDawu) - the campaign built considerable support from elected representatives, who signed a pledge for a "fair slice" through equality budgeting in September 2013 (supporters included Labour backbenchers, and members from the opposition parties - see photos of the photo stunt and the pledge board here: http://ift.tt/2idcIOM) - in October 2013 and 2014, we held a post-budget event with over 50 civil society organisations in the Mansion House, undertook a survey, and collated the resultant research (see report attached) - invited presentations to two Dail committees (on petitions, and on social protection), with the latter resulting in a study visit by the committee to Scotland to learn more about Equality Budgeting there - numerous media engagement activities, including articles in The Irish Times, the Journal.ie and similar outlets - submission and representation of the campaign at a hearing on women's human rights by the UN CEDAW committee in 2017, the first such examination of Ireland to take place in over a decade (read the submission here: http://ift.tt/2gGDaN0) We are delighted that the Equality Budgeting Campaign has been instrumental in prompting a serious overhaul of the Irish budgeting system, which includes the setting up of a Budget Office and an Oireachtas committee on budgetary scrutiny. We hope that this work will now be continued by IHREC to ensure equality-focused budgeting, including impact assessments and evidence-based policy-making that will ensure a more equitable Ireland. We thank all of the organisations and individuals who have made the work of the campaign possible over the last number of years. http://ift.tt/2yL0RhQ