So the Good Friday Agreement? How do LEAVE propose to sort? (on Brexit and Northern Ireland - title amended by MNHQ)

[RedToothBrush]

Go on. Lets have some answers.
Can we have a proper talk about how we can stop this affront to democracy and ripping up of a peace plan?

[LoveInTokyo]

If you're a candidate country then yes you have to be a signatory to ECHR before you can join the EU. But I don't think there is anything in the treaties requiring existing EU members to remain in ECHR. Probably because they never thought any EU member states would be mad enough to want to withdraw from ECHR. Lots of things are happening which nobody would have predicted a few years ago.

I think the EU accession to ECHR is about the EU itself (as a quasi-governmental organisation) being subject to the same obligations as national governments. But there have been considerable legal difficulties around the EU's accession to the ECHR - I'm not sure what stage that has reached yet.

[caroldecker]

Leaving the ECHR would put much more strain on GFA than leaving the EU. The EU is mentioned in passing, but the ECHR is explictly referenced as n obligation.
I said Conservative MP's have a moral obligation to respect the referendum result, not all MPs

[HyacinthFuckit]

You also said it was morally binding on the Lords, even though that obviously contains NI peers and they represent a country with not a single Tory MP (indeed, the last attempt to involve them, the UUPs electoral pact with the Tories in 2010, was a total failure). This is, however you slice it, not at all straightforward wrt to NI.

[LoveInTokyo]

Given how little voters in the rest of the UK seem to have thought (or cared) about the impact this would have on Northern Ireland, it makes me wonder why the Northern Irish want to be part of the UK at all. Obviously I realise it is really not that simple, and who knows whether the Republic of Ireland would be in favour of reunification anyway, even if Northern Irish voters wanted it. The sad things is that it took decades and decades to reach a peaceful solution, and all that could now be at risk.

[GloriaGaynor]

Afaik EU itself is bound to abide by the ECHR.

Lisbon Treaty Article 6:

1. The Union shall accede to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Such accession shall not affect the Union's competences as defined in the Treaties.
   

1. Fundamental rights, as guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and as they result from the constitutional traditions common to the Member States, shall constitute general principles of the Union's law.
   

It was Rees-Mogg, ardent Brexiteer and Lord Falconer labour peer who pointed this out to May, accusing her of being 'ignorant of EU law'.
Whether technically you could wriggle your way out of that would be a question for EU law experts.

[Peregrina]

I think even our very modest discussion about whether existing EU members need to be part of the ECHR or not, helps to illustrate just how thorny some of these problems can be. I appreciate that we are not lawyers, so are not as well versed in interpreting laws as they have to be.

[GloriaGaynor]

I said Conservative MP's have a moral obligation to respect the referendum result, not all MPs

Apols for pointing out the bleedin' obvious but the Leave result did not define the terms. That is up to interpretation.

Even if you think there's an 'moral' obligation to leave, which there isn't, there's certainly no obligation for a hard Brexit given that many Leavers favour a soft one.

[LoveInTokyo]

Yes - the EU as an institution, as opposed to the individual member states. It's a slightly theoretical question at the moment because no member state has actually tried withdrawing from ECHR so it's never really come up.

The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (which covers a lot of the same ground as ECHR) was incorporated into primary EU law through the Lisbon Treaty, so we are still bound by those rules for as long as we remain in the EU.

[LoveInTokyo]

I appreciate that we are not lawyers

[GloriaGaynor]

The Republicans don't want to be part of the U.K. the Unionists/loyalists do.

The ROI is broadly in favour of unification (going by opinion polls), it's the the NI unionists who aren't.

[LoveInTokyo]

The ROI is broadly in favour of unification (going by opinion polls), it's the the NI unionists who aren't.

Either way, Brexit reopens the debate, and whichever side "loses" is not going to be happy.

[GloriaGaynor]

A lawyer who doesn't know the basics of NI?

Well you can argue it out with Lord Falconer.

[RedToothBrush]

researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN06577
Is adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights a condition of European Union membership?

The government actually looked into this.

They concluded that it wasn't legally clear. This is code for, would get challenged in court and cost a lot of money. And you might get kicked out the EU for it. We don't actually know.

The actual report is 6 pages. Its interesting.

[LoveInTokyo]

I know the basics of NI, but nowhere near enough to say I really understand it. I did say before the referendum that I was surprised no one was talking about NI and the impact Brexit would have on them.

EU law is more my area though.

[GloriaGaynor]

Thanks for that.

[GloriaGaynor]

Why are you asking why NI would want to be part of the U.K. then? The reasons are old and deep.

Why emphasise the ROI view of unification when the whole question depends on the North?

[HyacinthFuckit]

Some of us are lawyers!

[Peregrina]

Apologies to those who are lawyers. I'm not, but have done the odd module on it.

[LoveInTokyo]

Sure, I realise that might have come across as a bit flippant. But let's say you're from Northern Ireland, you voted remain, you identify as British but you remember the troubles and are happy with the relative peace Northern Ireland has enjoyed for the last 20-odd years... you'd be pretty pissed off, wouldn't you? If you considered yourself part of the UK but it turned out the rest of the UK didn't appear to care too much about you?

[GloriaGaynor]

From the polls I've seen around 70% of Unionists were in favour of Leave, the majority of nationalist/Republicans support Remain (80-90% in some polls). So this is what many Unionists voted for. Quite what they thought was going to happen as a result I don't know.

As I say Unionism/Loyalism is much to do with the past Orange/Scotland sectarianism etc etc...

[LoveInTokyo]

I haven't seen any of those polls. If what you're saying is true, and the republicans were strongly for remain, that strengthens the case for a referendum on a united Ireland considerably. So I agree with you, I'm not sure what those unionists thought they were voting for. Not that there are enough of them to have been able to influence the result either way.

[GloriaGaynor]

Polls aren't needed to observe that Foster - Unionist was Leave (whether genuinely I don't know) and McGuinness - SF was Remain.

Republicans in NI want to be united with ROI independent of WM, so it stands to reason they would be pro EU. (Altho there are Eurosceptics among them and you could argue that some are more anti-WM than positively pro-European).

The will for referendum has to come from the North.

The whole notion of unification is what the Republicans were fighting for, so it a very, very sensitive subject indeed.

McGuinness has already called for a border poll, whether it will happen is a moot point.

[HyacinthFuckit]

If you look at the geography of NI, broadly speaking areas with a higher Protestant population were more likely to vote Leave and Catholic to Remain. That's a generalisation, and there were a couple of majority Protestant areas voted Remain though no majority Catholic areas that went for Leave, but broadly it holds.

However, there are cleavages within that. The DUP, a Unionist party who opposed GFA, were Leave. So were the TUV, hardline anti GFA Unionist/Loyalist. The UUP, pro GFA, were Remain. They didn't take their stances purely on a GFA basis, but clearly the need to rewrite GFA if we leave the EU is less of a problem for the TUV who don't support it anyway than it is for the UUP who do. On the Catholic side, the republican leaning constituencies recorded strong Remain votes: no doubt the stuff about Britain taking back control went down badly for those who don't want anything to do with Britain anyway. However, some Catholics did vote Leave and some political figures from the Catholic community did support it. Eamon McCann and Gerry Carroll of PBP, for example. Part of the reason for this is because they think it will be more likely to lead to a united Ireland (PBP refused to designate as nationalist or unionist in the Assembly, a decision I agree with, but they do want a united Ireland). And republican leaders have been quick to use the vote to call for a united Ireland referendum, which of course is the entirely sensible thing for them to do. McGuinness argued for a referendum in the event of a Leave vote months before it happened.

[LoveInTokyo]

Ugh... complicated! In many ways a united Ireland would make a lot more sense, but the prospect of all that violence starting up again is pretty scary.

[HyacinthFuckit]

Also the question about why anyone in NI would want to stay in the UK when we don't actually give a shit about them was asked by more than a few NI Nationalists and Remainers after the vote. And indeed many times before that. While that question can indicate a lack of knowledge about the situation and history there, it doesn't have to. It is, after all, abundantly clear that not many people in the rest of the UK were thinking about NI when they cast (or didn't cast) their vote, and this is hardly the first time they stand to get something imposed on them that they didn't vote for.