This project models the series of formal and informal negotiations which led to the publication, in December 1993, of a declaration issued jointly by the British and Irish Governments. The Joint Declaration was a critical policy document which paved the way for a ceasefire and the entry of Sinn Féin into formal talks. It also laid out a shared set of principles – including, crucially, self-determination for the people of Ireland subject to the consent of the people of Northern Ireland – which would come to underpin the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and provide a framework for its ratification.
If you are looking for a particular phrase within the written texts considered by this negotiation, you can search for moments when this phrase was introduced for consideration or decided upon. This is often the most helpful starting-point for legal research.
Alternatively, you may wish to search the descriptions of each event within this negotiation. This will not search for phrases under consideration, but rather the text of the various minutes upon which this edition of the negotiation is based.
You can view a list of all committee sessions or you can view committee sessions scheduled for the future.
To search the minutes of a particular committee it is easiest to use the committee visualization pages (from here you can further drill down to individual sessions)
If you already know the committee session and date you want, find it in the Full Record or type the date into the search box below:
You can discover the complete list of documents considered by the negotiation (and find where they were introduced) on The Convention Document Map.
If you are interested only in the documents as they appeared at the end of the negotiation (with any rejected documents removed), you can use the The Convention Current Document Library.
You can browse the contributions by individuals or delegations to this negotiation using the relevant visualization