 It's a really great pleasure to introduce Professor Michael O'Flaherty. Michael is a man of the West, Panty Galway. He's been director of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights since December 2015. Until February 2013 he was an established professor of human rights law and director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the NUI Galway. He served as chief commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and from 2004 to 2012. He was a member of the UN's Human Rights Committee, naturally as a vice chairperson. He has a range of other important distinctions but maybe we'll stop at that. But he's now in this particularly interesting role as director of the EU and EU Agency for Fundamental Rights and the title of his speech today is I think a hugely interesting one. The trick is always put a question mark at the end so you don't get in trouble for your statements. But is your facing a crisis of human rights? In order to answer that question let me go back to 1948 and an instrument with which I imagine you're all very familiar, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article one of which has this extraordinary statement, all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and in rights. That's one of those phrases that is so often repeated and that trips so easily off the tongue that one can forget to pause every now and then and just reflect on that astonishing claim that was made in 1948. A claim which moreover triggered a remarkably dramatic development in international law and in international practice. The development of the human rights protection system above all at the United Nations but also here in Europe primarily through the work of the Council of Europe and since 1948 in other words that lofty claim of the Universal Declaration has been converted into yes certainly a flawed but nevertheless a pretty remarkable set of structures globally and regionally matched with a very detailed statement of what those rights are as contained in the European and the United Nations treaties. I've had the privilege myself to see the engagement of those commitments and those systems at first hand. I worked in Bosnia during the war and I was impressed by the extent to which I truly was impressed and surprised by the extent to which human rights was used as the organizing framework for the peace process that emerged out of that dreadful conflict. A few years later I worked for the United Nations in Sierra Leone and frankly we didn't know half the time back then why we were monitoring why we were reporting the situation. But many years later I went to the Sierra Leone special court and I gave evidence on the basis of the work I had done back in the day in every single one of the war trials including that of Charles Taylor and so the human rights system its standards and its mechanisms served to help lock up some of the most evil tyrants you could imagine. More recently I worked in Northern Ireland and again here I saw the extent to which building human rights guarantees into the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and into all that followed helped stabilize the society and build a possibility that all parts of the community could believe in its future and in their equal place in its future. Just two more, forgive me for being a bit autobiographical, but just two other moments when I experienced the power of the system at first hand. One was in work I did ten years ago on promoting the human rights of members of the LGBT communities and what we did there was we identified what the experience of life is for a person who self identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender and then we mapped those experiences onto the international human rights commitments. It was a document that became known as the Jogjakarta Principles but its relevance for today is the extent to which we were able to make a genuine contribution to advancing the human rights of this community on the basis of the international standards and the structures that have been put in place. And then finally as Tom mentioned in the introduction for eight years I was a member of a UN monitoring body called the Human Rights Committee and I could not count for you the amount of times where some engagement in that context improved a situation on the ground. Frankly, it's even saved lives. I know of some people who would have been executed were not for intervention on the basis of law and through these structures if there hadn't been an intervention from the Human Rights Committee. Of course while I speak of this astonishing success story since 1948 I'm not starry eyed and I'm not naive at least I hope I'm not and I'm well aware that for every achievement there's been a violation and the violations never stopped. There never was a period without significant patterns of human rights abuse across the globe manifested in all manner of different ways. But what was in much of that period I think important to recall was that while the violations never stopped at no time did violators ever claim that the rights themselves didn't exist or were somehow to be challenged. The system itself was not challenged. Let me give you an illustration of that. Not so very long ago when the second President Bush came into office you'll recall the preoccupation over things like waterboarding of suspects and I recall and I recall it at first hand because the United States came into a dialogue with us in the UN Human Rights Committee at the time and the the major effort of that administration was to demonstrate that waterboarding was not torture. That's interesting. They recognized even in those days that some would describe as very dark days that you do not you do not attack the system. You somehow try and define yourself out of the system but you don't challenge the very fundamentals. And so yes the violations continued I don't believe the fundamentals were challenged and in fact what's more throughout all those years the system incrementally grew stronger and stronger. Three quick examples. 21 or is it 22 years ago the office of High Commissioner for Human Rights United Nations High Commissioner was established. The position that Mayor Robinson among others held. It had become such an important bully pulpit if you will to maintain a site to the standard. It's a very important development internationally. 1997 or 98 I'm bad on dates. The International Criminal Court was established. Again a sea change in terms of accountability for the abuse of rights. And then third there is and I'm not going to say much about it despite my title or my job rather the EU. The poor old European Union for all the maligning it gets for all the criticism for all the derision for all the the the the the endless perceptions as what's wrong is nevertheless quite an astonishing operation in terms of its commitment to rights. I have never worked ever in a transnational super national or international organization that takes more seriously and explicitly its commitment to base its work on rights. I am just come back from Warsaw a few days ago where I was sitting down with Frontex the new Border's Agency of the European Union and on the on in the plane on the way over there I read their new regulation. They were just re-established a few months ago and I read the new regulation. I counted how many references to rights in the regulation 102. Isn't that astonishing? It's a 20 page document and it is 102 references to how the European border work must be done in compliance with rights. You won't you won't see that anywhere. You won't see that reflected at the national level. And another another demonstration of the extraordinary achievement rights related achievement that is the EU is a charter of fundamental rights. The what some of you say never has there been a better less known human rights treaty in the history of the world. The charter only engages of course when states are EU when states are engaged in areas of so-called EU competency but you know the competency of the EU is very wide and they engage and of course they oblige and commit the EU institutions. But it's a really rather impressive human rights treaty if you look at it and it includes some rights that you will find nowhere else. For example an explicit right to asylum. It's the only human rights treaty in the world that explicitly guarantees asylum. It matches that with a guarantee of non-refoulement that nobody will ever be expelled back to situations of persecution. Just to take another couple of examples it contains a guarantee of fair procedures. And sorry good administration. A human rights treaty that has a commitment of good administration. You know cross over to the world of ombudsmen that's really imaginative. And then just one last example because I don't have the time. Or you don't. The the the the charter contains a right to found a business. And again I just find that really creative and interesting and a way to present rights in a different way in different worlds. So again another example and from the EU of of an ever strengthening framework for the protection of rights. And finally in terms of the EU I won't talk about it unless you're interested in a Q&A. There's the work of the agency I direct the fundamental rights agency which is the which is globally unique. There is no other region on earth that has established an independent body to support it in delivering on rights and its methodologies also are globally unique. But again I can come back to that later if you wish. So I deliberately set out a rather optimistic picture of a story of achievement not withstanding all those violations. But it's at this point I need to change direction because I'm wondering right now in 2016 if my endless optimism for the system my fundamental belief in its solidity whether that is increasingly indeed naive whether the the the the foundations are actually under threat in a way that I wouldn't have believed possible just a few years ago. Why am I asking myself these questions? Well let me give you a few examples. In the first place I wonder to what extent the refugee crisis is is is is is a is a daily constant and shocking reminder that we have perhaps given up on the human rights project. You know the figures very well but let me just recall a few of them. One million people came into the European Union in 2015 alone in the context of the migration crisis. Of those three fifths were from the 10 top refugee producing states. That means is three fifths come from countries from which it is to be expected that you are a refugee that you are fleeing persecution Syria and Afghanistan countries of that kind Eritrea. And of those one million somewhere between 30 and 40% were children. And of that 30 or 40% that were children unknown thousands were unaccompanied so called unaccompanied minors. The vulnerabilities that that group faced faces and will continue to face are quite astonishing. Our agency has been present at the Greek hotspots Greek and Italian hotspots for the last year. And we have chronicled in public reports which are available online. Some very disturbing patterns and practices. For example, we surveyed the health care situation of of these migrants a few months back. And we discovered that the primary health problems of the migrants in the country. When I say migrants, I'm referring exclusively to the context of the crisis. The primary health problems are respiratory and dermatological, meaning the lungs and the skin. And what's most disturbing is that they're contracting these problems of lung and skin after they arrive in Europe. You know, there's a somehow notion that they came with illness. They're contracting it once they arrive on our shores. We chronicled the story in some camps in one in one country. The story of women who go to bed at night wearing diapers, because they're afraid to leave their sleeping area to go to the latrine, because they're afraid of being sexually abused. And so they put on nappies in Europe in 2016. The failings the persistent failings across so many countries and so many contexts for child protection have beggar belief during the last year. I went to Lesvos last January. I saw something that thank goodness you would not see today. We have made progress. But nevertheless, last January, I saw children in cages. That's the only way to describe them, not unlike what you'd see at Dublin Zoo, frankly, better at Dublin Zoo. And now why were they in cages for protection? It was a crude form of protection, but crude. And again, that's just one of so many examples with regard to a failing of delivering to children what they're entitled to receive. That's rather the micro level at the at the macro level at the bigger. How do you solve the crisis problem? I obviously, perhaps I should have started here. We see such a terrible failure. Yes, we're saving lives. There's no doubt about it. The projects Poseidon and Triton are saving a lot of lives. And what is the L.E. Samuel Beckett? Is that the ship that's there at the moment? Yeah, just yesterday, I saw it doesn't actually read it. There's an article in The Economist this week about the Irish contribution to saving lives in the Mediterranean. And so lives are getting saved. There's no doubt about it. But think of all the lives that are not getting saved. And then, of course, the extent to which we as a European Union as a community of states have basically told Greece and Italy to sort it out on their own. This obviously leaves me with a great sense of concern. A concern that's all the more compounded by the extent to which we have dealt with these problems successfully in the past. I mentioned Bosnia. We were able to absorb hundreds of thousands of Bosnians for a relatively short period in the 90s, many of whom went home again. And then a generation earlier, we were able to address not so much here in Ireland, I suppose, but certainly in middle Europe, Austria and elsewhere, the migrants and refugees from Hungary. So the refugee crisis leaves me wondering what is our future. But there are other contexts as well, which compound my sense of unease. One is the extent to which in Europe we seem to be willing to tolerate quite astonishing levels of inequality. We seem to be rather complacent about the extent of inequality in our societies. Is that perhaps because we're not confronted by the face of what that term actually means? What is that face? Well, we could be here all day, but I'll just pick one category. We will publish new findings on the situation of the Roma in Europe in coming weeks. And we will report, for example, that whereas the poverty rate in the general population in Europe is 17%, the figure is 80% in the Roma community. We'll publish figures on the fact that one in three Roma children goes to bed hungry, one in three lives in accommodation without an indoor toilet, without running water, where, and I forget the exact figure, where something like 80% of a young adult Roma are unemployed. And I could go on and on and on. But that is illustrative of patterns of inequality across our wealthy European Union, which don't seem to concern us greatly, don't seem to get us very excited. Take just one or two other examples. I'm worried about the growth in patterns of hate speech and hate crime across EU member states. We are on a weekly basis capturing data regarding this situation. It's getting worse. In the context of our Roma, sorry, of our migrant crisis reporting, we're telling stories in the public domain, in these monthly reports, time and time again, we're telling stories of swastikas appearing on migrant camps, of people giving the Nazi salute on villages and towns in central Europe, of buildings being burnt out. I could never mind all the stuff that's happening online. And this is what worries me particularly, not only do we have a growing incidence of such crime, but we have an unwillingness, it seems, in some places to prosecute that crime. An unwillingness to call it out. Take for example, and I neither will nor do I need to give specific examples, but just recall some of the statements made by some politicians in Europe in recent months which have crossed the line of criminal hate speech. And do we see any energy and enthusiasm in their countries for prosecution? Well, I certainly don't see it. And then finally, in terms of examples, before I get hopefully a bit more analytical, I'm worried at the moment about the discourse around national security. Let me start, but let me be clear though. In the first place, nobody disputes the need for national security. Nobody disputes the need to counter terrorism with effective strategies on the part of governments. But at the moment, what's rather worrying is the extent to which the debate around national security seems to be a zero someone in as much as the more you concede to rights, the less secure you are. And again, that's unchallenged in quite a few EU member states. In the context, for example, of surveillance and the application and design and redesign of surveillance legislation. So, yes, Europe is facing a crisis of human rights. It's not exclusively European crisis, but it is embedded in our in our in our European society. So what can we do? You know, I'm not going to talk grand policy with you this afternoon. I'm not going to talk great social designs, great ideas to refashion and remold our communities. It's not my competence, to be honest. Rather, I'd like to just go inwards a little bit to the human rights community if there is such a thing. Those of us who are working with the standards, those of us who are working in the institutions, those of us who work in the state or in institutions that have a formal and solemn commitment to rights and ask, what could we do? And what could we do to rehabilitate our own system? And it's in that context then I'd like to make my few last remarks this afternoon. To locate my remarks, I should say that last June in Vienna, we invited 800 people engaged in the area in the work of promoting and protecting human rights in Europe to come to Vienna to discuss what's wrong and what could we do better. They came from government with many ministers. Minister Stanton came from here. We have we national human rights bodies, academics, civil society, you name it. Very, very widely drawn group of experts, practitioners and scholars. And they came up with many suggestions. And in fact, the outcome document is I think probably here, where's Alice is nodding, it's downstairs or it's outside, you can pick it up. So it's got 120 different proposals as usual. But within that there are four ideas that I find very compelling. I'm going to name the four and then I'll explain what they mean. Okay. So I'm just naming them now. No explanation. Number one, make a better business case for human rights. Number two, put a familiar face on human rights. Number three, put human responsibilities back into the mix with human rights. And number four, do a better job of figuring out what human rights look like in practice. Okay, now to explain them. And I'll locate them in four dimensions of the Vienna conference last June. Firstly, and briefly, put a business case for human rights. That was said by the senior compliance officer of IKEA worldwide. He explained how IKEA is human rights compliant. And he's proud of that. But the reason it's human rights compliant is because that's good for the bottom line. I think he said more than that. He also spoke about the ethical dimension. But he did remind that human rights compliance makes for more profits. And I thought we need to transpose that thinking right across all of human rights. Too often, we the human rights types, we demand that you respect human rights from our lofty mountaintop, just because it's the morally virtuous thing to do. And I think we need to do a better job there of going past the virtue, the call to integrity and virtue and sell the idea of why the human rights way will be the better way. The Burkini fiasco this summer, you all know what I'm talking about. The police interfering and arresting women wearing this garment on French beaches. Through the way in which the authorities in those towns invoked national security to interfere with the women on the beaches, they made a laughing stock of their state. They angered women everywhere and they probably alienated some more young people in the Muslim community. And it would have been so easy to make the business case for how a more rights-respectful way to engage with this issue would have led to better results also in terms of national security. So first, make the business case. Second, put a familiar face on the holder of rights. What this is getting at is the extent to which rights has increasingly been perceived out there on the street as being about others. It's about the victim far away, the person on the edge of our society. Sometimes the person we don't like. Again, to borrow an example, well-known one, the UK fuss over giving prisoners rights. It's about rights for those people that we don't even like. We lock them up because they do bad things to our societies. This perception is embedded very widely that rights is just about the other. Right certainly is about the other. And if we lose that, we lose the integrity. It's always about the marginalised, the forgotten, the left behind. But it's also about all the rest of us. And this point came very powerfully through at the Vienna conference when the European network of human rights institutions spoke about work it's doing right now on human rights of older people in nursing homes. And we spoke about the unexpected impact that this work is having. Because suddenly human rights is about my mother, my granny, my sister, but somebody in my family who's in a nursing home, in an old folks home. Suddenly human rights came home to my family. When we frame the problems my mother has in the nursing home in terms of human rights. And that's what I mean by putting a familiar face on human rights. And we never forget the unfamiliar face but remember it's also about us. The third of the four was that of putting responsibilities back into the mix. You know I heard a very senior former prime minister of a European country say on radio, not so very long ago, that we have too much talk of rights. We need to talk about responsibilities. His comment angered me. Because it was the comment of somebody who has not read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I don't remember is it article 26 or 28. I don't remember which. But it explicitly says rights trigger responsibilities. Including personal responsibilities of the rights holders. So in other words from the very beginning this system has been constructed as an interplay of rights and responsibilities of give and take in order for our societies to thrive. And yet we've somehow in our narrative totally overlooked the responsibility dimension. And this came out in Vienna from a workshop led by migrants. Speaking about their experience of integration in the countries to which they've arrived. And a reminder from them that successful integration requires a give and take of right and responsibility both of the migrants and of the indigenous resettled communities. And again I think this needs to be made much more visible. And then the final of those four suggestions that emerged from the conference was that of figuring out what it means to implement rights in practice. And what this is, this came from a workshop on hate speech. And the point was made at this workshop that actually we don't need to be debating whether we're against hate speech. We're all against hate speech. We don't need to debate whether we all agreed that it should be prosecuted. We're all for prosecuting it when it crosses a certain line. But time and time and time the issue came back to but we don't know how to do it. It's extremely difficult. How do we get people to report the crime when they they're afraid of authority or when they perceive the authority has the same bias as the speaker of the hate speech. You know if you're accused, attacked for being gay and you believe that the police are homophobic in some countries that's a perception, you'd never go to the police. So there's a challenge of reporting. Then there's a challenge of recording. How do you effectively and appropriately record the hate element? And then all the way all that pathway through to prosecution and justice. And the point I'm making here I don't want to talk too much about hate speech and per se but rather the extent to which the fine claims made in human rights treaties are a million miles away from their application in practice on a day-to-day basis. It's extraordinarily difficult to do human rights governance. Because so often we don't know what the unpacking of that lofty right is on a day-to-day basis. And we all need to do a much better job of doing that unpacking. So they're the four areas. I think they're not a bad shopping list for the human rights community to do a bit of rehabilitation of its own house. I don't believe that that rehabilitation is enough to resolve the greater issues. It's not going to solve the migrant crisis overnight. But I do believe that it will restore human rights to being the respected space and framing of which it used to be as we struggle to solve some of society's greatest challenges. And so I can assure you that that is going to be a preoccupation of the Fundamental Rights Agency of the European Union in the next few years. And I hope that we can work with you in whatever configurations so that we all together can pick up again the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, pick up its Article 1, All of Us Born Free and Equal and Dignity in Rights, and be better able to guarantee that that's a matter not just of rhetoric, but also of reality. Thank you.