Rights campaigner Raymond McCord outside Belfast High Court. McCord, one of three people backing the case, said he would fight the decision in an appeal that could be heard in Belfast as early as Friday and hoped to join the other challenges in the U.K.’s highest court next week.Brian Lawless/The Associated Press
Belfast’s High Court dismissed on Thursday a case arguing that a British exit from the European Union without a withdrawal agreement would contravene Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord.
The case is one of a series across the United Kingdom challenging Prime Minister’s Boris Johnson’s Brexit strategy. Johnson has said Britain must leave the EU on Oct. 31, whether or not it secures a deal on an orderly exit.
Scotland’s highest court of appeal ruled on Wednesday that Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament for five weeks was unlawful and should be annulled, a verdict that will be appealed at the United Kingdom Supreme Court next week.
Rights campaigner Raymond McCord, one of three people backing the case, said he would fight the decision in an appeal that will begin in Belfast on Friday and hoped ultimately to join the other challenges in the UK’s highest court next week.
Lawyers for McCord had argued that a no-deal Brexit would breach the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to the British-run province, but Judge Bernard McCloskey said the case “trespassed upon the prohibited domain of the nonjusticiable.”
“I consider the characterization of the subject matter of these proceedings as inherently and unmistakably political to be beyond plausible dispute,” McCloskey said in a 68-page written judgment.
“Virtually all of the assembled evidence belongs to the world of politics, both national and supranational.”
A lawyer representing Johnson’s government said on Monday that under Article 50 of the EU Treaty, the obligation to negotiate was on Brussels rather than on the member state.
U.K. legislation in 2017 and 2018 “assumes but does not require a Withdrawal Agreement,” said the lawyer, Tony McGleenan.
‘GROUNDBREAKING LEGAL CASES’
The Northern Ireland case had also sought a legal challenge to the suspension of parliament but the court decided to hear the wider case against “no deal.”
Parliament was prorogued, or suspended, on Monday until Oct. 14, a move opponents argued was designed to allow the prime minister to push through a no-deal exit from the European Union on Oct. 31 with little scrutiny.
A separate legal challenge to the suspension, brought by British campaigner Gina Miller, will also be heard by the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
McCord said Northern Ireland should also be present at the Supreme Court and Belfast’s Court of Appeal agreed to hear brief arguments on the prorogation on Friday, with a hearing on the wider no-deal case challenge due on Monday.
McCord’s lawyer, Ciaran O’Hare, said the Court of Appeal could opt to refer the prorogation issue directly to the Supreme Court or hold a full hearing on the issue on Friday that would ultimately be appealed in London if McCord lost.
A third option is that McCord would simply intervene in the Supreme Court proceedings next week.
“These are groundbreaking legal cases and the plan is for all of these cases to meet in the Supreme Court,” O’Hare told reporters.
McCord’s son was murdered by pro-British militants in 1997, just before the peace deal, which largely ended three decades of violence between Irish nationalists seeking a united Ireland and pro-British unionists. Some 3,600 people died in the conflict.
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