Northern Ireland's PILS Project (PILA's sister organisation) and the Law Centre (NI) recently held a seminar on the topic of third party interventions in public interest litigation. Third party interventions occur when a non-party to litigation (such as an NGO, law centre or other organisation) applies to the court to intervene because they have a particular interest in the case's outcome, and want to make their views heard. Fiona Doherty BL (a prominent human rights barrister in the North, and a member of the PILS Project's board) gave a presentation which reviewed the landscape of Northern Ireland interventions, and provided guidelines and key questions for potential interveners.
The presentation described the greater familiarity of courts with intervention applications on the back of recent cases - but also the greater scrutiny judges will put on the merits of an intervener's application. The cases mentioned were Re Peter Neill (a case challenging the introduction of ASBO legislation in NI), Re E (a child) (a case concerning the policing of protests at the Holy Cross school in Belfast) and Re McCaughey & Quinn (a case about the applicability of the UK's Human Rights Act to pre-Act killings). The presentation highlighted a key problem - that the intervener's interests may and will often not align directly with those of the applicant for judicial review. Proposed interveners need to think carefully about their intervention and how it may impact on the case being advanced by the parties - where potential damage is identified, that will need to be balanced against the possible benefits that an intervention could bring.
"Safety in numbers" is a potential lesson that can be taken from Fiona Doherty's presentation and the cases mentioned. In the successful Re McCaughey & Quinn appeal, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC, still wary from its rebuke in Re E) joined forces with the Equality and Human Rights Commission in England and Wales to make concise written and oral submissions.
Organisations in the Republic seeking to make interventions in human rights cases before European-level courts have already taken this collaborative approach. In 2008, the Irish Human Rights Commission (as Chair of the European Group of National Human Rights Institutions) organised a third party intervention before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in D.D. v Lithuania. In 2010, the Immigrant Council of Ireland and the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission made joint third-party submissions to the ECtHR in O' Donoghue v UK which dealt with Irish and UK constitutional law respectively.
Click here to read a paper by Tony McGleenan BL about strategic interventions in public interest litigation from another recent PILS Project seminar.
Click here to read a paper by Karen Quinlivan BL on interventions from an April 2007 FLAC Seminar on Amicus Curiae Interventions.