Prof Monica McWilliams will this morning be appointed chief commissioner of the troubled Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) to succeed Prof Brice Dickson, according to reliable sources.
Northern Secretary Peter Hain is today due to appoint the former effective leader of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition to lead the human rights commission into what the British and Irish governments hope will be a new, less-fraught era.
Prof McWilliams takes over a body riven by controversy and resignations and a failure to establish a bill of rights for Northern Ireland. Up to seven new members are also due to be appointed today as commissioners on the 10-member NIHRC, which was established in 1999 under the terms of the Belfast Agreement.
Prof McWilliams in this full-time appointment will be challenged with effecting a root-and-branch overhaul of the commission in order to generate greater political and community support for the organisation and the principle of human rights.
Prof McWilliams was viewed as the main spokeswoman for the Women's Coalition even though it had no declared leader. Prof McWilliams and Jane Morrice won seats for the party in the 1998 Assembly elections, but failed to hold or win any new seats in the Assembly poll of 2003.
The Women's Coalition is in the process of being deregistered as a political party although it will continue as a more general organisation. After she lost her seat, Prof McWilliams, originally from Kilrea, Co Derry, returned to her post in the University of Ulster as head of women's studies and political policy.
She also has more specific human rights experience as she previously chaired a political sub-committee charged with determining how best to ensure that the human rights elements of the Belfast Agreement were implemented.
The NIHRC under Prof Dickson regularly came in for criticism from nationalist and unionist politicians over its plans for a bill of rights. Prof Dickson was also pilloried for his controversial handling of a legal case relating to the loyalist picket of schoolgirls attending Holy Cross primary school in north Belfast.
Prof Dickson complained in turn that he was hampered in his attempts to make the commission successful by a lack of British government support.
A recent report written by Prof Stephen Livingstone and Dr Rachel Murray, of Queen's University Belfast and the University of Bristol respectively, partly supported this claim. It accused the British government of failing to adequately support and resource the commission, six of whose former commissioners have resigned.
Any human rights commission in Northern Ireland would have faced "significant problems," the report stated. "However, the NIHRC has not responded well to these challenges. Its failure to develop a clear strategy and a unified commission has undermined its ability to act effectively as regards the promotion and protection of human rights for all."
