Irish human rights lawyer and former priest Michael O’Flaherty was elected human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe on Wednesday, vowing to defend human rights law and institutions and stand up for the people of Ukraine.
The role is the most senior non-judicial post ever held by an Irish person in the Council of Europe, the Strasbourg body of 46 member states that was founded in the wake of World War Two to prevent abuses, including through the European Court of Human Rights.
The role of the human rights commissioner, a six-year non-renewable term that was instituted in 1999, involves being an international advocate for human rights who coordinates with national authorities and civil society, reporting and advising on how protections are upheld.
“The role of the commissioner is particularly important today, at a moment when we don’t just have human rights abuses, but we have a rejection of the system,” O’Flaherty told the Irish Times.
“If we reject the human rights system, we reject the only universally agreed roadmap to honor human dignity and that will be a disaster,” he continued.
“So much of what we take for granted in terms of our freedoms and our rights in our societies, is because of the Council of Europe.”
O’Flaherty (64) is the outgoing Director of the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency and previously spent 18 years in the United Nations in various roles, including setting up human rights operations in Bosnia-Herzogovina, Sierra Leone, and in the Asia Pacific.
Originally from Galway, O’Flaherty was chief commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission from 2011 to 2013, and worked as a professor at the University of Nottingham and the University of Galway. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1987, but left the priesthood to take up human rights work in the 1990s.
He was nominated by the Irish government to succeed the outgoing commissioner, Bosnian human rights expert Dunja Mijatović, and was formally recommended in a letter by Tánaiste Micheál Martin as someone with “extremely strong credentials” for the role.
The Irish candidate won with 104 votes out of 211 in a vote of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly on Wednesday night, defeating rival candidates Meglena Kuneva of Bulgaria and Manfred Nowak of Austria. He will take up the post on April 1st.
O’Flaherty said his experience in the North was essential preparation for the post, as he witnessed “the role of human rights in building bridges and establishing trust across divided communities”, and that it was significant for an Irish figure to hold the position.
“Coming from Ireland means that the commissioner comes from a small country that doesn’t have a history of colonial domination. A country that has known enormous challenges throughout history, including starvation,” he after the result was announced.
“We have the experience of the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement and the peace process which carries enormously relevant lessons for many other societies that are facing conflict.”
He ran for the post on a platform of defending the human rights of people in Ukraine as they suffer a Russian invasion, upholding human rights law and institutions, and standing up for minorities.
“In the first place, we have to stand up for the people of Ukraine, their human rights,” O’Flaherty said.
“Then we have to then we have to tackle all the other problems: the shocking levels of hate in our societies, the rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the inequalities between people, the backsliding on democracy and rule of law.”
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