Caroline Simons
On Tuesday, Ireland appeared before the UN’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a mechanism of the Human Rights Council that calls for each UN Member State to undergo a peer review of its human rights records every four years.
Minister of State Emer Higgins represented the Government at Tuesday’s session, where member states both praised and questioned Ireland on a range of issues, including abortion.
In a welcome development, South Africa and Romania called on the Government to take steps to tackle the issue of coercive abortion in Ireland.
The calls from these countries are very timely as recent cases in Ireland have demonstrated the reality of coercive abortion here. In Letterkenny Circuit Court in February, a man received a nine-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to procuring abortion pills and forcing his ex-partner to take them against her will, resulting in the death of her baby. He had locked her in a room and threatened her with violence. In January, a man was sentenced to eight years in Mullingar Circuit Criminal Court following a campaign of violence and coercive control that included forcing his former partner to have an abortion after threatening to ‘kick the child out of you’.
Speaking from Geneva, where she was covering the event on behalf of the Pro Life Campaign, Caroline Simons said: “We warmly welcome the recommendations from countries like South Africa and Romania calling on the Government to take meaningful action to tackle the scourge of coercive abortion in Ireland.”
Ms Simons also responded to calls from certain countries for Ireland to further liberalise its abortion laws. She said: “Anyone who listened to the full Universal Periodic Review (UPR) session [on Tuesday morning] could not have failed to notice the strikingly coordinated nature of the calls from these countries for us to abolish the three-day waiting period and expand abortion access. These calls fly in the face of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which recognises that children need ‘special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth.’ The fact that many, if not all, of these countries either permit abortion on request up to birth or discriminate against unborn babies with Down syndrome or other disabilities in their abortion laws should not be overlooked in this discussion.”
Later today, the UPR Working Group is scheduled to adopt the recommendations made to Ireland following on from this week’s review.