Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations - Transitional ...

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8. CRIMINAL JUSTICE 57 8.1 The Good Friday Agreement 57 8.2 The Review of Criminal Justice 57 8.3 Equity Monitoring 58 8.3.1 Human Resources 58 8.3.2 Other Stakeholders in the Criminal Justice System 60 8.3.3 Gender Disaggregated Statistics 60 8.4 The Judiciary 60 8.5 Restorative and Reparative Justice 64 8.6 Community Safety 65 8.7 Law Reform 66 8.8 In Summary 67 9. POLICING 69 9.1 The Good Friday Agreement 69 9.2 The Patten Report 70 9.3 Patten Recommendations on Human Rights 70 9.4 Composition of the Policing Board 71 9.5 Community Policing 71 9.6 Support for Widows 72 9.7 Composition of Policing Bodies 72 9.8 Post Patten: PSNI 75 9.8.1 PSNI Draft Equality Scheme 75 9.8.2 PSNI Neutral Working Environment Policy 76 9.8.3 PSNI Recruitment 77 9.8.4 PSNI Human Rights Programme for Action 77 9.8.5 PSNI Gender Action Plan 77 9.8.6 PSNI and Domestic Violence 79 9.8.7 PSNI and Equity Monitoring 79 9.9 District Policing Partnerships 79 9.9.1 Relations between District Policing Partnerships Community Safety Partnerships 79 9.9.2 District Policing Partnerships and Women 80 9.10 The Oversight Commissioner 80 9.11 Office of the Police Ombudsman 80 9.11.1 Complaints 80 9.11.2 Staffing 81 9.11.3 Police Ombudsman and the Carryduff Case 81 9.11.4 Other Policing Challenges 81 9.12 International Best Practice 82 9.13 Disarmament 83 9.14 In Summary 83 10. CONCLUSION 85 REFERENCES 86
Women’s Rights in Transitioning and Conflicted Societies Foreword by Professors Christine Bell and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin This working report is designed to open a discussion on how women have figured in the implementation of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. While equality for women was not conceived of as a central issue in the conflict, women and equality issues were substantively integrated into the Agreement. The difficulties with the Agreement’s implementation at the political level have been publicly debated and much analysed. The research of the Transitional Justice Institute (TJI) has contributed to a growing appreciation of the dilemmas and difficulties of implementation of the Agreement at the institutional and legal level. This report forms a preliminary attempt to track how the Agreement’s provisions on women and equality have been implemented, and begins to unpick the relationship between equality for women and implementation issues more generally. It begins to paint a broad picture of implementation: it starts from the premise that asking the ‘women question’ is crucial, not just to equality for women, but also to understanding more generally how implementation of a peace agreement does and does not work. This report raises more questions than it answers, but in doing so, reframes some of the key questions at the heart of current political and legal discourse. What does it mean to secure something in the text of an agreement? What were the goals of the Agreement? What does it mean to ‘implement’ the Agreement? How is successful implementation to be measured: by whether institutions are up and running, or by tangible benefits in life chances? What are the obstacles to implementation? From a gender perspective, the report begins to track: where and how were women acknowledged in the Agreement? What provisions stood to further women’s participation and equality? How were these implemented in practice? What was the relationship between sectarian and power divisions understood to be at the heart of the conflict, and women’s rights? The report is very much a starting point, however, the information contained herein, to our knowledge, has not yet been gathered together elsewhere. Indeed, the very difficulty in accessing data relating to women and reform forms the basis of one of the report’s main recommendations. While this work is very much in progress within the TJI, we felt that the information in this report should be released publicly as soon as possible, as a means of facilitating further debate. We are hoping that the response and debate it prompts will itself feed into further collation of the information in the report and analysis of the issues it raises. This is in line with the ‘praxis’ model of research – interchange between research and practice towards models of social change – that has lain at the heart of feminist approaches to socio-legal studies, and that also forms a key tool for TJI research. Background and Context In most societies, including Northern Ireland there has been a greater public awareness of women’s rights and of the deficits in equality across a range of contexts for women in recent decades. Despite this awareness, systematic discrimination remains for a reality for women - evidenced by a lack of meaningful equality of opportunity in employment, payment differentials, the lack of access for most women to affordable childcare and the double load that working women carry of combining career with primary care responsibilities for children and elderly family members. In traditional societies in which belief systems combine with and reinforce patriarchal structures the issues are even more complex. Moreover, pervasive gender-based violence is an ongoing reality in many
Page 1 and 2: Women and the Implementation of the
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Page 7 and 8: language of the Agreement) this was
Page 9 and 10: An overall assessment of the succes
Page 11 and 12: 1. RESEARCH 1.1 Sources Primary doc
Page 13 and 14: 2. MAIN FINDINGS The main findings
Page 15 and 16: 3. THE GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT In 199
Page 17 and 18: ecent history of communal conflict
Page 19 and 20: 4. PARTICIPATION OF WOMEN IN PUBLIC
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Page 23 and 24: 4.7.2 Northern Ireland Office Publi
Page 25 and 26: 5. DEALING WITH THE PAST 5.1 The Go
Page 27 and 28: failure of the report by Victims Co
Page 29 and 30: • Have resources been put into im
Page 31 and 32: Northern Ireland Act 1998 67 and wi
Page 33 and 34: and domestic violence are included
Page 35 and 36: particular circumstances in Norther
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Page 39 and 40: symbols of the past (including rena
Page 41 and 42: 75. - (1) A public authority shall
Page 43 and 44: With regard to the economy wide gen
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Page 51 and 52: Essentially, seven years after the
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explain that the paragraph ‘is in
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equality clause purports to deal wi
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8.3 Equity Monitoring 200 There are
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• Females are more likely than ma
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ecommended 228 a ‘programme of ac
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conferencing system for juveniles.
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Gender is ‘piggy-backing’ on th
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The Independent Commission of Polic
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oadly reflective of the population
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linked to women with caring respons
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competitions for police officers (u
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9.8.7 PSNI and Equity Monitoring ov
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9.11.4 Other Policing Challenges De
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with not the same emphasis as the i
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REFERENCES Bell, C. (2003) PEACE AG
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____ (2004) Model Equal Opportuniti
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____ (2003) ‘New Era for Local Po
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____ (2003) Peace Agreements As A M
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