8 November 2001 Edition

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Euro Court rules against Britain... again

The British government violated the rights of a County Tyrone Catholic after the Secretary of State rejected him for a job in the North's civil service, according to a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights.

In the ruling, made on Tuesday 30 October, the court agreed that Francis Devlin, a Catholic from County Tyrone, had his right to a fair hearing violated when he was denied employment as an administrative assistant in the civil service. The court awarded Devlin £10,000 damages and ordered the British government to pay £12,000 costs.

Devlin was initially approved for the job in 1992 but was rejected after the then Secretary of State issued a certificate "certifying" that Devlin's application was turned down, "for the purpose of safeguarding national security and of protecting public safety".

Devlin applied for judicial review, saying he was turned down because he was a Catholic and a member of the Irish National Foresters (a 100-year-old Catholic organisation formed to provide mutual help and combat poverty).

However, this application was rejected, which the judges in Strasbourg ruled meant that "there was no independent scrutiny of the facts which led the Secretary of State to issue the certificate. No evidence that Mr Devlin was a security risk was ever presented to the Northern Ireland Fair Employment Tribunal".

The Strasbourg court unanimously ruled that the lack of any means to challenge the decision to label him a security risk breached Francis Devlin's right to a fair hearing, guaranteed by Article Six of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The European judges also decided that, "the secretary of state's unchallengeable certificate was a disproportionate restriction of Mr Devlin's right of access to a court".

Ciaran Bradley of the Equality Commission, who took the case to Strasbourg on Devlin's behalf, said the commission was pleased with the result.

"This was quite a low level. It wasn't a sensitive position," he said. Bradley also pointed out that recent legilation provided for an independent tribunal to scrutinise the issue of certificates, but so far it had not been called on to sit. "How satisfactory it is we'll have to wait and see."


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