ICCL has published our annual report on our work and finances for 2022. We continued to expand our work in all areas we are active in, ultimately leading to a greater impact on the protection of rights.
ICCL Director Liam Herrick said:
“With our new five-year strategy, approved in 2022, we have ambitious plans to continue to grow our programme of work across our policy output, Oireachtas engagement, public campaigns and communications.”
Dr Vicky Conway
ICCL was devastated by the loss of our friend and colleague Dr Vicky Conway in July 2022. Vicky was a brilliant and ground-breaking academic who made an enormous contribution to Irish law, and played a crucial role in reform of An Garda Síochána – notably through her work on the Policing Authority and the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland.
Vicky was an academic, broadcaster and activist of unmatched integrity, commitment and passion. In the time since she died, we have missed her, but we will continue to make sure that we honour her memory in our work, particularly on policing reform. She will be with us every day as we work for an Ireland that is more just and equal for everyone.
Administration of Justice
ICCL had a number of key achievements in the area of Administration of Justice in 2022. We launched a new website with information for victims of crime, www.infovictims.ie. We also began work on a EU-funded victims rights project called Survive, Overcome and Support Victims of Crime (SOS) led by White Circle Croatia, designed to assess the extent to which victims are aware of their rights across the EU and provide training on victims rights.
ICCL was established as a key stakeholder in the Special Criminal Court review process through a conference, submissions and media appearances. This led to ICCL being invited to attend two closed meetings with the Independent Review Group.
ICCL recommendations were reflected in both the Judicial Appointments Bill 2022 and the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) List of Issues for examination in Ireland. ICCL also made submissions to the Oireachtas Committee on Children regarding the Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme Bill 2022 and to the Oireachtas Committee on Justice regarding the Inspection of Places of Detention Bill 2022.
In March, ICCL co-hosted a cross-border conference on policing with our colleagues from the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ). We also continued our work on three key pieces of policing reform legislation intended to implement the recommendations of the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland: the Garda Síochána (Powers) Bill, the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Bill and the Policing, Security and Community Safety Bill.
The Oireachtas Justice Committee decided to examine the operation of the Coroner’s Service, citing ICCL’s 2021 report Death Investigations, Coroners’ Inquests and the Rights of the Bereaved. ICCL was invited to make a submission and appear before the Committee, with many of our recommendations appearing in the Committee’s report. ICCL also supported and contributed to legislation which amended the process by which juries are appointed within the Coroner’s Service to all the Stardust Inquests to take place.
Equality and Discrimination
ICCL continued our work campaigning against hate crime and extreme hate speech, and chairing the Coalition Against Hate Crime. Together with fellow Coalition members, ICCL launched the ‘Hate Crime Hurts Us All’ campaign. The Coalition continued to grow, reflecting the strength and diversity of Irish society, and increased its policy and communications output. ICCL also commissioned research by consultancy group Diversity Matters on experiences of racial profiling by police in Ireland.
Throughout 2022, ICCL was involved in the Abortion Working Group. We participated in submissions to Government on how to to strengthen Ireland’s abortion laws as part of the review of the Termination of Pregnancy Act 2018. Along with our colleagues at Together for Safety and the Abortion Working Group, ICCL played a key role in the bringing forward of legislation on safe access zones, the General Scheme of the Health (Termination of Pregnancy Services (Safe Access Zones)) Bill.
ICCL’s advocacy to the UN Human Rights Committee about the State failing to provide effective access to abortion care led to very specific recommendations from the Committee about the problematic criminalisation of practitioners, the barriers created by the mandatory three-day wait period, and the barriers that force pregnant people with foetal abnormalities conditions to travel abroad for abortions. The Committee also recommended the provision of safe access zones and equal access to abortion services for those from marginalised groups such as asylum seekers. The Committee also addressed the rights of intersex people in its recommendations, which had previously been raised with the Committee by ICCL.
ICCL also made submissions to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Gender Equality, sharing our assessment on implementing the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality’s recommendations. The Government has since committed to holding referenda on changes to the constitution, such as removing outdated references to the role of women in the home, expanding the reference to family and recognise the role of carers, and enshrining equality and non-discrimination in the constitution.
ICCL launched the latest addition to our Know Your Rights series with the publication of Know Your Rights: A Guide for International Protection Applicants.
Democratic Freedoms
After years of advocacy, the draft Charities (Amendment) Bill 2022 was published including a provision that would see human rights recognised as a valid charitable purpose and if enacted, would allow ICCL and other similar organisations to register as charities. ICCL appeared at the Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection to outline our position on the Bill. Despite welcoming the the advancement of human rights as a charitable purpose, we expressed concern about advice from the Charities Regulator which narrows the space for charities to engage in ‘political’ advocacy to advance their charitable purpose.
The revised Electoral Reform Bill 2022 was published in March and despite making submissions on the Bill, meeting with the Minister of State for Heritage and Electoral Reform, and engaging in extensive advocacy to brief TDs and Senators to build support for amendments tabled at Committee stage, our recommendations were not included in the Bill, and our efforts to secure amendments were unsuccessful. The European Commission has raised serious concerns about elements of this legislation. ICCL wrote to the Commission on this matter in August, and followed up with a request in October for details for their contact with Government, which was released to us under FOI in December.
ICCL expressed considerable concern in 2022 about what we see as an abuse of the legislative process by the Government, with many bills being rushed through the Oireachtas without proper oversight or debate. We coordinated an open letter from over 20 Irish civil society organisations to the Oireachtas Business Committee, party leaders, the Ceann Comhairle and the Cathaoirleach of the Seanad highlighting these issues, and our Executive Director Liam Herrick published an op-ed in the Irish Examiner on this topic.
ICCL coordinated and drafted a submission with inputs from seven partner organisations for the European Commission’s Rule of Law reporting process. As a result of the submission, ICCL was selected to meet with representatives from the European Commission as part of their Rule of Law country visits on 7 March. The Rule of Law report was issued in July and contains many of the topics and recommendations which we included in the joint submission. The Commission was highly complimentary of the work in our submission and we were invited to speak about it at the annual conference of the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels in September. For the 2023 reporting cycle, we organised an October event in Europe House in Dublin to mark the beginning of the process.
Digital Freedoms
ICCL worked extensively in 2022 with European legislators to identify and close serious loopholes in the draft Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. The Act is set to be the first piece of legislation regulating artificial intelligence and as a result will likely be replicated around the world.
With our European colleagues, ICCL succeeded in giving people control over toxic algorithms on digital platforms like Tiktok, YouTube and Facebook in the new EU Digital Services Act. This is a leap forward for 450 million people’s autonomy and freedom of thought, and a major step towards curbing extreme hate speech. In Ireland, ICCL continued to advocate against the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill in 2022, arguing that significant parts of the proposed legislation may not meet human rights standards. Unfortunately, it was signed into law in December.
In March, ICCL launched a lawsuit against the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for its failure to protect people against Google’s real-time bidding online advertising system. The DPC received a complaint about the system in September 2018, but had failed to investigate. After significant campaigning by ICCL on the need to reform the DPC, in late June we had a partial win when the Government announced that it will appoint two additional Commissioners to head up the body. However, rather than commissioning an independent review as we had called for, the Government announced that the DPC would review itself. In September, we wrote to the European Parliament LIBE (Justice) Committee alerting them to this decision. In December 2022, we secured a significant win when the EU Ombudsman Dr Emily O’Reilly concluded an inquiry into a complaint by ICCL, recommending that the European Commission monitor all Big Tech cases that fall under the responsibility of the Irish DPC. The outcome was the result of correspondence with the Ombudsman dating back to September 2021. At the end of 2022, the Commission’s response to the recommendation was outstanding.
In October 2022, ICCL revealed that An Garda Síochána is retaining files on people wrongly flagged as suspect sharers of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) after clearing them of this suspicion. We have asked the Data Protection Commission to examine the matter. Big Tech companies use error-prone scanning technology to scan our emails and messages for known Child Sexual Abuse Material. When this technology detects a ‘match’ between a known CSAM image and an image in an email or a message, the case is referred to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the US. However, this ‘matching’ technology can create false positives. ICCL has revealed that of the 4,192 referrals NCMEC sent to An Garda Síochána in 2020, 471 were false positives. In response to ICCL’s revelations, An Garda Síochána told media that one rationale for retaining this data is for “reference and intelligence material in respect of future investigations”. This is deeply problematic for people’s rights to privacy, data protection and presumption of innocence. In November, ICCL with Digital Rights Ireland and the European Digital Rights network, of which ICCL and DRI are members, held a briefing aboutthe legislation in the Oireachtas for all TDs and Senators to highlight the dangers of a proposed regulation from the EU Commission that will replicate the NCMEC system with detection orders that would see the introduce of mass scanning.
Oireachtas
ICCL also developed an Oireachtas engagement strategy. This included tailored strategic Oireachtas priorities for each ICCL policy area and its relevant staff member in order to maximise our impact on the legislative process. Aside from our briefing documents and meetings, submissions and parliamentary questions, ICCL also developed a regular Oireachtas newsletter which outlines our priorities for forthcoming legislation, and produced our second pre-Budget submission.