Human Rights and Fiscal Oversight : A Case Study of the Northern Ireland 2011–15 Budget

Increasingly we find that legislatures are considering human rights issues. This article looks at one area where legislative assemblies may offer a distinctive contribution to human rights protection, when exercising their historic role in matters of finance and budgets. The purpose of this article is to see how human rights principles, such as those in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, overlap with the practice of a parliamentary committee involved in fiscal oversight. To that end, this article analyses the discussion of the Northern Irish Budget 2011-2015 from the perspective of human rights principles