Legislating with rights in Northern Ireland : why Stormont's exceptionalism is Stormont's paradox

The human rights architecture contained within the Good Friday Agreement and translated into statutory law as the Northern Ireland Act 1998 is institutionally impressive. And yet, from a functional perspective, it may have produced the least impressive human rights culture of comparable Westminster-style systems. This paradox—a sophisticated human rights architecture that has failed to produce a modern human rights legislative agenda—is at the heart of a post-conflict society that is unique for its combination of consociational principles of power sharing embedded within a human rights legislative culture. Here, we explore this paradox from an institutional and empirical perspective in three steps. First, we outline the consociational elements of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 and the political context in which it operates. Second, we outline the "legislative competence" obligations that require the Northern Ireland Executive, the Presiding Officer of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to certify that bills introduced in the Assembly are rights compliant and within legislative competence. Finally, we provide an empirical overview of how these checks work in practice to test the validity of primary legislation enacted by the Assembly.