TWO GOVERNMENT Ministers have dismissed claims from the bishops that the Civil Partnership Bill may be unconstitutional, while human rights groups have challenged the opposition of the Catholic bishops to the measure.A spokesman for Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern said he had stated time and again that the Bill has been carefully drafted, on the advice of the Attorney General, to ensure that it does not undermine the constitutional position of marriage. He added that the provision of civil partnership for same-sex couples is a civil rights issue and is supported by all parties in the Oireachtas.
Mr Ahern also said there were no proposals to allow a free vote on “this important legislation”.
Minister for the Environment John Gormley said he was “taken aback” by the comments of Bishop Christopher Jones of Elphin on the matter.
“It is not unconstitutional,” he said, speaking on RTÉ. “It has been checked inside and out.” He said he hoped to see the Bill passed before the summer.
Bishop Jones had also suggested that the provisions in the Bill which could expose civil registrars to sanctions if they refused to deal with civil partnerships would be unconstitutional.
A leading human rights lawyer has said that this view was “at best tenuous if not tendentious. It is decidedly ill-founded as point of international human rights law”.
Donncha O’Connell of NUI Galway, who at present is Visiting Senior Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Human Rights in LSE, was the Irish expert on an EU expert group on fundamental rights.
The group was asked for an opinion on conscientious objection and human rights law in the context of a draft treaty between Slovakia and the Holy See which referred to abortion, but the opinion looked at the matter in the general context of international human rights law.
The opinion stated that it was important that the exercise of the right to freedom of conscience did not conflict with the rights of others, specifically the right not to be discriminated against. It concluded that the draft treaty could lead to Slovakia violating its obligations under a number of international human rights instruments.
Mr O’Connell also said that this issue had already been tested in the UK courts, where a registrar challenged London Borough of Islington’s insistence she perform civil partnership registrations, to which she objected as a committed Christian. She won her case when it was heard by a tribunal, but the council successfully challenged this in the UK Employment Appeals Tribunal, whose ruling was confirmed by the Court of Appeal last year.
In its ruling the UKEAT said: “It would be wrong for the employers to accommodate the claimant and thereby lend support to discrimination which the law forbids. This is particularly so given that the council itself is under a legal duty to provide its services without discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.”
The Equality Authority said that allowing public servants to put personal religious beliefs before the requirements of civil law would “set a dangerous precedent that could impact very seriously on a range of individual rights and freedoms enjoyed by people in Ireland today”.
The gay rights campaigning group, Glen, said there was overwhelming public support for the Bill. “The Catholic bishops are, of course, entitled to their opinion on civil partnership. Churches are also entitled to marry whom they wish in their churches,” said Kieran Rose, its chairman.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties also dismissed the bishops’ views. Its director, Mark Kelly, said: “This Bill is a secular measure to combat discrimination being passed through the democratic parliament of a secular state. It contains not a single word regarding the moral preferences or religious practices of the Catholic Church.”
SIC: IT