DUP slams 'biased' Human Rights Commission

The Democratic Unionist Party has accused the North's Human Rights Commission of ignoring unionist concerns and only acting in the interests of the nationalist community.

In his response to the Commission's proposed Bill of Rights, DUP spokesman Nigel Dodds said: "We will not tolerate the issue of human rights being the preserve of one community any longer.

"We want to see the human rights agenda affording equality to unionists as well as nationalists."

Among the DUP's objections to the Bill of Rights are its failure to address the current inability to exclude parties with paramilitary links from the power-sharing Executive, its insistence that criminals should be protected from discrimination and its failure to exclude paramilitaries from its definition of victims.

The DUP also accused the Human Rights Commission of failing to recognise that the Orange Order and other Protestant societies had been denied the freedom to exercise their religious beliefs by marching through nationalist areas.