Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights

In July 2001, the Irish Supreme Court decided that the right to a free primary education as contained in the Irish Constitution could not be extended to a 23-year-old autistic man, Jamie Sinnott. Much of the Supreme Court judgment is an exercise in statutory interpretation. The Court considered the meaning of both ‘primary’ and ‘education’ in the context in which it appeared in the Constitution – that of the rights of parents regarding the education of their children. Whilst it was happy to find that the type of on-going care and support required by Jamie Sinnott could be classified as education, nevertheless, the majority of the Irish Supreme Court limited the meaning of ‘primary’ education to that required by children and thereby excluding the care and support, which it recognised as ‘education’, required by profoundly handicapped adults. The impact of the Court's exercise in statutory interpretation is that, in Ireland, the right to free primary education is to be defined with regard to age and not needs.

This paper examines the decision of the Irish Supreme Court against the background of the general right to education as provided for in international human rights law in an effort to ascertain the extent to which the Supreme Court decision, as it reflects Irish domestic law regarding the provision of free primary education, correlates with Ireland's international human rights obligations. In so doing, it will reveal the limited extent to which the rights of disabled person have been ‘integrated’ into the general right to education. To that end, Part 1 of this article will focus upon the Sinnott Case as it provides an effective summary of domestic law regarding primary education as contained in the Constitution, statute and case law as well as being the benchmark for the rights of disabled persons to education in Ireland. Part 2 will consider the provisions of international human rights law regarding that pertain to the rights of disabled persons. Part 3 will consider the right to education as provided for in international human rights treaties by comparing the provisions regarding the general right to education, provisions regarding primary education, and provisions regarding persons with disabilities. Part 4 concludes this article by drawing together the right to education and the rights of disabled individuals in an analysis of language and interpretation in an effort to determine the extent to which the rights of individuals, such as Jamie Sinnott are protected by both national and international law.

After the reunification in 1990, Germany started prosecuting persons responsible for the inhumane border-policing regime in the former GDR, which had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of citizens attempting to flee the country. This article focuses on the conviction of a former GDR private border guard for homicide. The border guard brought the case before the German Constitutional Court, and later the Strasbourg Court, claming that his conviction violated the prohibition of retroactive punishment. Neither complaint succeeded. The article argues that, whilst formally upholding the absolute prohibition of retroactive punishment in Article 7 ECHR, the Strasbourg Court held in essence, as had the German Constitutional Court, that the prohibition of retroactivity had to yield to material justice in case of manifest violations of fundamental human rights, such as the right to life.

This article offers a review of the cases where the European Court of Human Rights has been called upon to decide whether or not the expulsion of a ‘quasi-national’ following criminal conviction violated the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court has adopted various findings since its first ruling in 1991. The first part of this article argues that neither the facts of the cases, nor the composition of the relevant judicial panels, nor an evolution in the overall political climate explain in themselves the inconsistency in the case law, qualified as arbitrariness by one of the judges. The second part of the article moves beyond a close socio-legal analysis to discuss the significance of the common rule (once inadmissibility decisions are taken into consideration), according to which quasi-nationals are deportable. Nationality law, at the core of the case law, is revealed as a fiction that creates privilege at the same time as it obscures the discriminatory basis of this privilege under the guise of operating a neutral categorisation of human beings. The article notes in conclusion the continuing grip of the nation State in the global age and deplores the legitimation, at the highest judicial level, of exclusion on the basis of unquestioned national privilege.