Loyalists voters claim Adams 'guilty' of human rights breach

Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams could be forced into court to face allegations he has abandoned 16,000 of his west Belfast constituents.

A petition signed by thousands of people in the loyalist Shankill Road district claims the Sinn Féin MP has failed them because he has consistently boycotted his parliamentary duties in the House of Commons.

Sinn Féin’s four MP’s have refused to swear allegiance to the Queen – as MP's are required to do – and are therefore blocked from sitting in the House of Commons. However they do possess office space in the Commons.

West Belfast independent councillor Frank McCoubrey is now, according to claims made yesterday, set to send the petition to Commons Speaker Michael Martin in the first stage of a campaign he hopes will lead to the European courts.

Mr McCoubrey claimed: “This is a fundamental breach of these people’s human rights. We are basically a forgotten community.”

Meanwhile speaking today Mr Adams described the new Northern Ireland electoral register as seriously flawed. He said nearly 190,000 people who should have been on the register had been missed off.

He said the situation was "scandalous" and that the electoral office should inform all those registered to vote that they have been counted.

The new register published in December showed that 1,072,346 people registered as electors during the canvass period. This compared with the 1,204,548 people canvassed over the period and represented an 89% overall response.

However the Electoral Office said around 90% of the electorate was a normal representation. They added that electors could check that their details have been correctly entered on the Register by visiting any one of the nine Area Electoral Offices or by calling into their respective District Council offices.

Chief electoral officer Denis Stanley said the new register reflected an “enormous achievement”.

“This is particularly so as the new Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002 required for the first time every elector to provide personal identifiers, including date of birth and National Insurance Number," he said.

"In addition, each registration form had to be signed personally by the elector. This necessitated a move to individual registration (away from the old household system) and in effect doubled the number of forms needed from 650,000 household forms to 1,200,000individual forms.”

(AMcE)