Justice bill weighed down with amendments

The most headline-grabbing amendments to David Ford's justice bill concern changing the law on abortion

Next week the assembly has scheduled an extra day's sitting.

In part, that's due to having to deal with voting on John McCallister's Opposition Bill, which MLAs debated last week.

But it is also due to the large number of weighty amendments which have been attached to David Ford's Justice No. 2 Bill.

The most headline-grabbing amendments concern changing the law on abortion.

But there are also proposals to create a new domestic abuse crime of coercive and controlling behaviour, to stop people disclosing private sexual photographs or films with an intent to cause distress; to create a specific offence of assaulting and obstructing emergency workers and to increase the penalties on those found guilty of cruelty to animals.

MLAs are able to attach all these disparate proposals to the bill because it has a miscellaneous section.

The advantage for a minister of having such a section is that if their department has a pressing priority which comes to the fore after a bill has begun its passage, then it can be tacked on at a later stage.

However, this also means that MLAs can insert their own proposals, whether the minster agrees or not.

Last month the Ulster Unionists tried to make an amendment to the shared education bill to change the rules around schools being exempt from fair employment rules when recruiting teachers.

The amendment was deemed to be beyond the defined scope of the bill. But with a miscellaneous section you can't make that argument.

So this week we had the justice minister launching a consultation on creating a coercive and controlling behaviour crime which won't close until well into the next assembly election campaign, while a DUP backbencher wants to get on with it much quicker, or next week to be precise.

Mr Ford told Good Morning Ulster that with such a big change, it would be better to have a proper consultation rather a quick amendment.

I wouldn't be surprised if opponents of liberalising the abortion laws make similar arguments about the proposals from Stewart Dickson and others on the sensitive issue of fatal foetal abnormalities.

Of course passing laws is one thing, enforcing them is another.

The SDLP's Dolores Kelly managed to get domestic violence protection notices put into a previous justice bill which became law in July last year, but I am led to believe they are still not being used in practice.