Stephen Livingstone Lecture 2024: Human rights heroes – to equality and beyond!

Human rights heroes – to equality and beyond! How activists can win the fight for justice. 

Thank you Professor Loughrey and Professor Harvey for your kind invitation and the warmth of your introduction. I truly feel among friends.

I am deeply honoured to have been asked to deliver this Stephen Livingstone memorial lecture.

Stephen was a powerhouse for human rights, by way of intellect and character, both in this jurisdiction and far beyond, and left a legacy of work, in activism and academia, which continues to be felt today.

Stephen believed that respect for human rights was a necessary part of a settlement of the Northern Ireland conflict and an essential underpinning of human dignity everywhere. He worked with colleagues across the world and particularly with his friends here in the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), indisputably one of the most important civil society organisations on these islands, to make that vision a reality. I am really pleased to be with you today to deliver the 2024 lecture in his memory.

In doing so, I hope to pay tribute not just to Stephen but to the activists, the people I consider to be human rights heroes, who every day take forward his vision of a just society. I want to start with a story.

On Tuesday 10 January 2017, a group of activists met in Room 258 in Parliament Buildings at Stormont. We were plotting.

The last attempt to secure legislation to allow same-sex couples in Northern Ireland to marry had been foiled. Not because a majority of MLAs had voted against. Actually, a majority had voted in favour of bringing forward legislation, but a petition of concern had been lodged to overturn the democratic will of the chamber.

Our campaign for marriage equality had won the moral victory, but the political victory, at least for now, was out of reach.

Northern Ireland was being left behind on human rights - again. England and Wales had legislated for same-sex marriage in 2013, Scotland in 2014, the Republic of Ireland in 2015 following a popular vote in favour.

It was that people-powered Yes Equality campaign in the South which inspired a group of activists to establish a new campaign for marriage equality north of the border. It became the Love Equality campaign and brought together activists from LGBTQI+ rights groups, The Rainbow Project, Cara Friend, and Here NI, as well the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the student movement NUS-USI, alongside Amnesty International. Three weeks after the referendum result was announced at Dublin Castle, tens of thousands of people came onto the streets of Belfast to demand marriage equality in Northern Ireland too.

So, eighteen months on, as we met in Parliament Buildings on that day, momentum was on our side. The opinion polls showed strong public support for a law change. A concerted lobbying campaign had led to a repeated No vote to same-sex marriage in the Assembly being turned into a Yes, only to have it defeated by Stormont procedure. This only strengthened the campaign’s determination for legislation. Would the Stormont institutions be able to deliver a law change that had both majority public and political support?

The plan was to launch a Marriage Equality Bill for the Assembly, four weeks later, on St Valentine’s Day. We knew that, unlike at Westminster, Leinster House, or Holyrood, same-sex marriage legislation would not be forthcoming from our government. It would have to come from the backbenches.

Legislation would be brought forward as a Private Members’ Bill, supported by a cross-party group of MLAs from Sinn Féin, the Ulster Unionist Party, the SDLP, Alliance, Green Party and People Before Profit. This was to be launched with a Valentine’s Day press conference in Stormont’s Great Hall, with big heart-shaped balloons and the whole works!

So, there we were, putting the finishing touches to our plans, when word came through from another room in Parliament Buildings.

Martin McGuiness had resigned.

The house of cards had collapsed. While we did not know it then, it would not be rebuilt - and then only on shaky foundations - for another three years.

There would be no Private Members’ Bill, no press conference in the Great Hall, no pink balloons at Stormont.

In every campaign I’ve been involved in, there are moments of disappointment and even sometimes despair. It can feel like defeat is unavoidable. This is where resilience is crucial. Some might call it stubbornness.

So, where next for our group of activists?

Where else but our remaining government, the one at Westminster? The campaign met Secretaries of State and Junior Ministers repeatedly and asked them to extend the GB legislation to couples in NI. No dice, they said. That would be interfering with the devolved institutions, they said. What devolved institutions? No help there.

Our human rights heroes – the activists from multiple organisations, the couples who entrusted the campaign with their stories to fuel public campaigning, and the thousands who, year after year, continued to march for equality, were not to be deterred.

Described as the odd couple, we found new champions in Conor McGinn, a Labour MP originally from Crossmaglen, and Lord Robert Hayward, a lifelong Conservative and vice-president of the Kings Cross Steelers, the world’s first gay rugby union team.

That Stormont Private Member’s Bill, crafted by the Love Equality campaign legal advisor Ciaran Moynagh, now became two Westminster Private Member’s Bills, introduced simultaneously to the Lords and Commons. Activists from Belfast had their foot in the door at Westminster and were not for leaving. The Bills wouldn’t become law, we knew that – Private Members’ Bills rarely do, but they provided the opportunity to lobby across both Houses of Parliament. The campaign was now quietly building up support on both government and Opposition benches.

When we got a tip-off that the Government was about to try to force a restart of Stormont with a short-notice Executive Formation Bill, an amendment was drafted for submission to the Speaker.

Conor McCormick of Queen’s School of Law assisted with that crucial clause. Gown and town collaborations are always welcome – and campaigners have benefited hugely from many excellent working relationships with members of academic staff here at Queen’s and at Ulster. Looking around this room, I see so many human rights defenders who have been indispensable to countless campaigns. I’m sure Stephen Livingstone would approve.

In tandem with the fight for marriage equality, Amnesty and many civil society groups, from Alliance for Choice to Informing Choices NI, the Royal College of Midwives and many more, had also been campaigning for abortion law reform.

While Stormont’s marriage ban was an affront to couples denied the right to marry, it’s refusal to lift a de facto blanket ban on abortion was a cruel violation of the right to healthcare.

Our abortion law was largely based on the 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act. It was long past time, over 150 years on, to finally put in place a humane abortion regime.

This campaign enjoyed support from parliamentary champions like MPs Diana Johnson and Stella Creasy, who crucially seized the same opportunity to propose her own amendment.

But, predictably, the UK government opposed both clauses as being out of scope of the Bill.

It was now a matter for Speaker John Bercow to decide. The moment he agreed to allow both amendments to go forward, the despair of 30 months earlier was replaced with a surge of hope and adrenaline. The behind-the-scenes lobbying work on both campaigns had already been done. We thought the support was there. Surely, surely success was within reach?

As MPs filed out to vote that evening in 2019, campaigners waited with trepidation for the outcome. I happened to be in London that day and was lucky enough to be able to sit with Robert Hayward in the Lords’ Gallery overlooking the Opposition benches in the Commons.

When MPs came back in after voting on the marriage equality amendment, Conor McGinn looked up and gave us a quick thumbs up. Vote count: 383 in favour, just 73 against.

Less than fifteen minutes later, the vote on Stella Creasy’s abortion amendment. 332 in favour, 99 opposed.

Success. Two huge victories. Same sex couples would finally be able to marry. People in Northern Ireland would be able to access safe abortion healthcare near where they lived.

The marriage equality campaign was celebrated in style with Robyn Peoples and Sharni Edwards becoming the first same-sex couple to marry in Northern Ireland when they wed in Carrickfergus just ahead of Valentine’s Day, 2020.

On their wedding day, with the world’s media pointing cameras at them, Sharni thanked the activists:

“If it wasn’t for them guys we wouldn’t be sat here right now. We just want to say thank you to everyone… everyone who has marched and signed petitions, everyone who has helped us get to this stage, we just want to say thank you.”

Of course, they were too modest, as they had become activists themselves. They had joined the marches and, like so many other couples during the campaign, had shared their love story with the media as part of the public effort to win equality for all.

Many people become what we might term accidental activists, without planning to do so, when they find their rights denied.

One such woman was Sarah Ewart, who did so much to overturn Northern Ireland’s antiquated abortion laws by telling her personal story over and over again. To politicians, to the media and ultimately in the courts.

Sarah, with whom we had the privilege to work, never identified herself as a campaigner, instead describing herself as someone with a “personal and emotional experience” and a “voice that spoke out”.

She made an immense contribution by courageously turning her and her family’s personal tragedy into a rallying call for legislative change when she was denied an abortion in Northern Ireland in 2013 in spite of doctors saying her expected baby would not survive outside the womb.

After every doctor she met told her there was nothing they could do, given the state of our laws, she found herself speaking on the Stephen Nolan radio show to make an appeal to political leaders to help. Spoiler alert: they didn’t.

Instead, she had to get on a plane to England with her husband for healthcare provided routinely in every other part of the UK.

Later, she would join with a brilliant activist and Amnesty colleague, Gráinne Teggart, in the Supreme Court in an intervention in support of the Human Rights Commission’s important challenge to the ban on human rights grounds.

Sarah ultimately secured victory at the High Court in Belfast in October 2019 when the court ruled in her case that Northern Ireland’s abortion law was in breach of the UK’s human rights obligations. Campaign action through the courts and in the corridors of power were converging to secure an historic change in the law.

Sarah is one of the human rights heroes we celebrate this evening. The quiet heroes who have refused to be quiet anymore, the voices that spoke out.

They were many such heroes, who, through marches and demonstrations, careful coalition-building and years of political advocacy at Stormont and Westminster, through email actions to MLAs and online petitions to Downing Street, through strategic litigation, all the way to the Supreme Court and back to Belfast, finally won the human rights campaigns on both abortion and marriage equality.

Evaluation time. A crucial part of any campaign. So, what had we actually won? Essentially - equal rights to those already available to people in every other jurisdiction in these islands. What a slog! What an effort, just to get around a dysfunctional polity at Stormont that stood in the way of equality.

Imagine if such energy could be invested in making real progress rather than having to fight just to achieve equal treatment and healthcare that people in neighbouring jurisdictions take as read.

Imagine having an Executive that worked for equality and human rights rather than operating as a roadblock to such goals?

Imagine if we could get to equality and beyond.

In my lifetime, Northern Ireland has come a long way.

To have grown up knowing only death and destruction on the news to being a father of children who know nothing of that time apart from what they hear from their parents, what they learn in their school books, or perhaps, most bizarrely, what they might see on Disney+. That shows how far we have travelled in a relatively short space of time.

But the promise of a human rights-respecting society, as set out in the 1998 Agreement, has only partially been met. And where we have moved forward, it has too often been despite our politicians and political structures.

While discussing the problems we have experienced in achieving better human rights outcomes in Northern Ireland, we must also discuss the national and global backdrop for human rights which has been the depressing and highly relevant context to our story over the last 25 years.

After the hope of the 1998 Agreement, the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11 2001, and the response of the world’s powers, including the war in Iraq and the unleashing of a so-called war on terror, marked a change for the worse in the global context, the effects of which we are still living with today.

The brutal crushing of the Arab Spring, turning millions of people into refugees, led to an increasing appetite to set aside long accepted international legal norms. Israel’s war on Gaza, aided and abetted by our own government and that of other UN Security Council members, has further undermined the post-1945 international legal order.

As the International Criminal Court Prosecutor warned earlier this year, “if we do not demonstrate our willingness to apply the law equally, if it is seen as applied selectively, we will be creating the conditions of its complete collapse. This is the true risk we face at this perilous moment.”

We owe a debt of gratitude to South Africa for its courageous litigation at the ICJ and invoking international law to defend the civilians of the Occupied Palestinian Territory from genocide.

How fitting that it should be one post-apartheid country standing up for people suffering under another apartheid system. As President Nelson Mandela said in 1997: “we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”.  

Professor John Morison, in his tribute to Stephen Livingstone at the Service of Thanksgiving and celebration of his life, noted that “South Africa and the inspiring struggle there to transcend a legacy of oppression and mistrust by using the framework provided by the constitution and by human rights was a particular interest in Stephen’s life.”

South Africa also played a part in Northern Ireland’s peace process. This included, in that same year of 1997, hosting a peace conference near Cape Town for the political negotiators who were making slow progress in Castle Buildings. Within weeks of the Indaba (the Zulu word for “gathering of the minds”), a second IRA cease fire was declared and newly energised negotiations subsequently led to the political agreement of Good Friday 1998.

The Agreement marked a huge step forward for human rights, embedding them in our constitutional settlement.

The second paragraph of the Declaration of Support which opens the Agreement declares that “the protection and vindication of the human rights of all” is one of the ways in which the signatories would commit themselves to a “fresh start” and “best honour” all those who had died and been injured in the conflict.

The Agreement committed the UK government to the incorporation of the ECHR into Northern Ireland law and to a possible Bill of Rights, the establishment of a new Human Rights Commission, one of whose tasks was (and I quote) “to consult and to advise on the scope for defining, in Westminster legislation, rights supplementary to those in the European Convention on Human Rights, to reflect the particular circumstances of Northern Ireland, drawing as appropriate on international instruments and experience.”

Huge progress has been made since, with the Human Rights Act, the Human Rights Commission, the Equality Commission, a new start to policing with the PSNI Code of Ethics drawing heavily from the ECHR and other human rights instruments such as UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials. The Policing Board’s oversight of the police using human rights standards to measure progress and performance has been hugely important, and has enjoyed the guidance of a succession of excellent human rights advisors, from Keir Starmer (whatever happened to him?) to John Wadham.

Given such firm foundations, one might expect that progress since 1998 would have been steady and straightforward.

But, sadly that has not been the case.

Where progress has been secured, it has invariably been thanks to dogged and determined activism pushing forward the realisation of rights.

Sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back. On policing, this year we have seen revelations via the Investigatory Powers Tribunal that the police have been deploying covert surveillance on journalists in an attempt to identify their sources, but also on staff from the Office of the Police Ombudsman, the very body set up to investigate police wrongdoing. Thank you to journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey for helping to shine a light into these dark corners.

Marriage equality took years too long to deliver. Not because people here didn’t want it. They did. Poll after poll showed significant majorities in favour, cutting across the traditional green-orange divide in our politics with a rainbow-coloured show of support. And ultimately not because the issue lacked enough votes in the Assembly. No, it was because the mutual veto system of government meant that nothing could progress.

Irish language rights campaigners have had to travel a similar, now well-worn, path to Westminster to get language rights respected when Stormont proved incapable of delivering legislation.

Young and energetic activists from An Dream Dearg campaign have filled the streets of Belfast in their thousands calling for recognition in line with the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. They deserve huge credit for their campaign, and ultimately, for their success. Maith sibh to them. This society is a richer place for having Irish and Ulster-Scots as part of our linguistic diversity.

Language rights, like other human rights, are not a zero-sum game. If Wales and the Republic of Ireland can be bilingual and Scotland can find public space to recognise both Scots and Scots Gaelic, why has it been such a painful struggle to have proper recognition of the indigenous languages of this place?

Thankfully, activists refused to take no for an answer and the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act became law at Westminster in 2022. Though I note, as of today, the Executive Office has still failed to appoint the Irish Language and Ulster-Scots Commissioners mandated under the law.

Stormont has an established track record as a barrier to the vindication of the human rights of the people who live here. The Executive Office could not even agree to appoint the panel of experts to the Ad Hoc Committee on the Bill of Rights, as envisaged in New Decade, New Approach. The panel had still not been appointed at the conclusion of the Committee’s work.

Just imagine how much worse things would be now if Stormont had not collapsed all those times. So, credit where it’s due!

But for all the wins that activists have been able to secure via the backdoor of Parliament, there are other issues on which neither Stormont nor Westminster have delivered for people here.

But, wherever I look, I see activists fighting for change.

Right now, Northern Ireland is suffering from its highest ever levels of racially motivated hate crime.

When racists ran amok in Belfast in August, attacking homes and businesses at will, it was the people of this city who came out in response.

Ormeau Road residents blocked the road to defend their neighbours. People on the Donegall Road used their own bodies to physically shield a man from being brutally assaulted. The community on the Falls Road responded with solidarity when their local ethnic food supermarket was targeted.

Thousands of people donated to crowdfunders to support people and businesses who had been attacked.

Activists from groups like United Against Racism, the Anaka Women’s Collective, the trade union movement, the women’s movement, and the LGBTQI+ sector took to the streets to overwhelm the small numbers of racists and to send a clear message: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’

It was no surprise that it was people from these activist groups who demonstrated leadership, because they show up time after time to support each other. In the words of the march slogan:

‘When migrants’ rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back.’

‘When trans rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back.’

‘When women’s rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back.’

Human rights activists, whatever the particular focus of their work and campaigning, understand the concept of intersectionality. We show up for each other.

But we cannot do it alone. Nor should we have to. We have a government with elected representatives, departments full of officials and multi-million pound budgets, and a police service with human rights central to its founding principles and code of ethics.
They are all accountable to us. And the job of the human rights activist is not just to protest, but to ask the difficult questions. To hold to account those with power. To take them to court when necessary. To defend those with the least power. To be willing to be unpopular ourselves.

That's why I would like to use this opportunity to commend the courage of the North West Migrants Forum, the Belfast Islamic Centre, the African and Caribbean Support Organisation NI and the Belfast Multi-Cultural Association. Their representatives gave evidence to the Executive Office Committee in September and challenged the ‘legitimate concerns’ narrative put forward by some politicians to explain or contextualise why people with dark skin or who pray to a different god were having their homes and businesses attacked.

Dr Naomi Green, from the Belfast Islamic Centre told the Committee: “It’s not enough to react when hate surfaces, the underlying causes that allow it to fester must be addressed. Racism and islamophobia intersect and there is a longstanding failure to address either of these in NI.”

We know that the Executive’s Racial Equality Strategy 2015-2025 is short on outcomes and short on resources.

Key commitments made in the previous 2005-2010 Strategy remain undelivered, such as the introduction of ethnic equality monitoring, reform of racial equality legislation, and the delivery of a refugee integration strategy. It is almost 20 years since the commitment to develop a Refugee Integration Strategy. It is still in draft form.

The United Nations has noticed. Once again, this is due to the work of activists in drawing attention to the problems and providing supporting evidence.

In August, the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination published its concluding observations. They set out numerous action points for the state authorities here, including calling on (and I quote): “the government of Northern Ireland [to] adopt robust measures to prevent and combat paramilitary racist violence and intimidation against ethnic minorities and migrants in Northern Ireland”.

The community leaders who gave evidence to the Executive Office Committee also challenged the police for their failures to properly respond to years of racially motivated hate crimes, long before the upsurge of attacks in August, to which there has actually been a significant policing response.

Shockingly, Beverly Simpson from the North West Migrants Forum told the Committee (and I quote): “Community members report being advised by the PSNI to consult, negotiate or listen to community leaders with a link to paramilitary organisations. This is not acceptable in any democratic, peaceful society.”

So why does it seem acceptable in ours?

Thirty years after the 1994 ceasefires, we still have armed and illegal paramilitary organisations holding communities within this society hostage.

So what courage these minoritised community leaders have shown in speaking up and challenging the status quo in Northern Ireland.

What chance do we have to build a rights-respecting society in the shadow of a gunman?

Twenty-five years ago, in the wake of the Agreement, Northern Ireland was leading the way within these islands on equality and human rights.

In the intervening years, our legislation has increasingly fallen behind neighbouring jurisdictions, notwithstanding Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, which largely takes a ‘what we have, we hold’ defensive approach to prevent human rights protections secured in 1998 from being rolled back as a result of Brexit.

The Agreement held out the prospect of a Charter of Rights for the island of Ireland and an ECHR-plus statute, in the shape of the Northern Ireland Bill of Rights, but the UK government of 2008 summarily dismissed the detailed recommendations submitted by the national human rights institution.

Despite polling evidence of strong cross-community support for such legislation, the proposals did not have cross-party support at the Assembly, and Westminster was quick to use this as a reason to withhold support, introducing a new and unrealistic test for progress which would have stopped the Good Friday Agreement itself, never mind policing reform, if it had been deployed in 1998.

What a missed opportunity. A tragedy really. If a Bill of Rights had been enacted at the time, which properly addressed the rights of victims of the conflict, perhaps not only could there have been much more progress towards justice and truth recovery, but there could have been a significant block in the road to the passage of the Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023.

A missed opportunity, but not yet a lost opportunity. Both the Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights Consortium remain strongly committed to a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights.

The Government’s other stated reason for not legislating for the Bill as proposed by the Commission was that there should not be different levels of rights protection legislated for in different parts of the UK. I quote from their official response:

“The Government’s initial assessment is that over half of the rights proposed in the NIHRC’s Advice are equally as relevant to the people of England, Scotland and Wales as they are to the people of Northern Ireland and, therefore, fall to be considered in a UK-wide context.”

However, in the years since the government rejected the idea of differentiated rights provision, that of course is exactly what has happened, and Northern Ireland has been left behind. Thank you to Professor Colin Murray of Newcastle University for contributing to the thinking in this section of the lecture.

The Equality Act 2010 does not apply here, meaning some people can face discrimination that would be unlawful in the rest of the UK, for example on the basis of age, disability or sexual orientation.

Meanwhile, devolution has led to divergent approaches to a range of rights and equality issues across the UK. For instance, in the last few years, legislation in Scotland and Wales has given the right to vote to 16 and 17 year-olds in local and devolved elections.

On children’s rights, the Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure 2011 provided for a range of duties, including a duty on Welsh Ministers to have due regard to the UNCRC’s rights and obligations.

The Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 followed suit, obliging Scottish Ministers to consider the UNCRC’s requirements in decision making.

The UNCRC (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024 has been more ambitious, incorporating the direct text of the UNCRC to the maximum extent possible within the powers of the Scottish Parliament and imposing obligations on public authorities.

The Scottish Government has said it sees the UNCRC Act as a first step in achieving a Scottish Human Rights Bill. This, it says, would give effect to a wide range of internationally recognised human rights, belonging to everyone in Scotland, within the limits of devolved competence, and strengthen domestic legal protections by making these rights enforceable in Scots law.

In particular, the Bill will seek to incorporate in Scotland ICESCR, the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The scale of the ambition is welcome, though we note that the timescale has now slipped. In parallel, Cardiff is developing proposals for a Human Rights (Wales) Bill or incorporation of individual international treaties into Welsh law.

In Northern Ireland, there is no similar drive to that seen in Holyrood and Cardiff from the Stormont Executive to innovate with the incorporation of international human rights standards into Northern Ireland law.

And despite four out of five main Stormont parties backing the 2022 report of the Assembly’s Ad Hoc Committee on a Bill of Rights, there is so far no sign of interest from the new UK government in taking forward the legislative work required.

This is disappointing, to say the least.

But it is also an opportunity. One, I think, that would have been of immense interest to Stephen Livingstone, who was deeply interested in the constitutional interplay between the different jurisdictions on these islands, and helped to establish the British Irish Human Rights Centre Network to enhance the flow of ideas on human rights.

The incoming Irish government should fulfil its role, as is appropriate for a co-guarantor of the Agreement, to support a new process to secure agreement, not just on the Bill of Rights but for the cross-border Charter of Rights.

According to the most recent NI Life and Times Survey, just 17 per cent of people trust Stormont to any degree. I respectfully suggest that confidence in Executive decision-making might be enhanced if there were evidence that it was ensuring the progressive realisation of rights such as in healthcare, housing and addressing poverty.

The recent review by the Public Accounts Committee of the Executive’s child poverty strategy was scathing. I quote:

 “We consider that delivery of the Child Poverty Strategy has been characterised by failure – failure to turn the curve and reduce child poverty, failure to monitor outcomes effectively, failure of collective working and accountability, failure to engage with children and the community and voluntary sectors, and now a failure to produce a new anti-poverty strategy.”

Save the Children has characterised the Executive’s performance in regard to child poverty as a “dereliction of duty”.

Of course, it does not have to be this way. Stormont has proved that it can actually deliver justice, when it sets aside differences to focus on the common good.

The establishment of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry was a brave attempt to right an historic wrong. It was as a result of a campaign led by remarkable activists such as Margaret McGuckin of SAVIA, Jon McCourt of Survivors North West, Gerry McCann from the Rosetta Trust and Cyril Glass from Survivors Together.

The work to establish effective accountability mechanisms for those who survived Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene Laundries, workhouses and, separately, the scandal of clerical child abuse, continues.

I want to pay tribute to campaign groups such as Birth Mothers and their Children for Justice and Truth Recovery NI, lawyers like Claire McKeegan and Kevin Winters and academics such as Professors Patricia Lundy, Phil Scraton, Leanne McCormick, Sean O'Connell and Dr Maeve O’Rourke. There are many more doing the hard yards to advance this society.

It is time once again for Northern Ireland to lead the way on equality and human rights.

Our system of government would benefit from improved decision-making and resource allocation within a human rights framework.

More Ministers, at Stormont and Hillsborough Castle, should pay heed to the hard work being done elsewhere to incorporate human rights into domestic law to improve the everyday lives of people.

They should listen to the experts in the field who deliver so much work in this region - from the delivery of practical services to the development of evidence-based policy to secure better government decision-making.

The activists, the campaigners, the grassroots grafters are the real heroes of this place. They always were. Through the Troubles, they held communities together, and helped them heal post-conflict. They are the ones who never gave up on this place, never gave up on each other, and never will give up.

Human rights campaigning is community building, because it is a fight for justice, for equality, for all.

Human rights heroes show resilience, compassion and dedication. But it is fundamentally about love. It is their love for their neighbours that keeps them going and inspires all of us to work harder, to keep fighting. 

There are always obstacles to overcome. Always have been. But I have great hope. I have seen people struggle, and then overcome and win through.

That work of progress is passed from one generation to the next, with today’s activists standing on the shoulders of giants like Stephen Livingstone - so they can see further.

Stephen Livingstone left us too soon, but not before he had passed the torch to a new generation of human rights heroes.

Thank you very much.