The State has failed to improve civil legal aid and anti-discrimination laws, two of the Republic’s oldest independent human rights organisations will tell the United Nations on Tuesday.Free Legal Advice Centres (Flac) and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) will highlight “the lack of progress in addressing” human rights issues in the Republic at a meeting of UN member states in Geneva. The statement will form part of the evidence gathered by the UN in advance of its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the State’s record.“The UPR is a unique process which examines the State’s human rights record as a whole,” said Christopher Bowes, Flac’s policy and public affairs manager in advance of the meeting.“In the five years since the last review ... Ireland has stalled if not regressed.”Speaking about proposed changes to the Civil Reform Bill, Bowes said the legislation may block disadvantaged groups from taking cases about access to basic public services like housing and education.Progress in areas such as anti-discrimination had “also stalled, leaving many victims of discrimination without access to an effective remedy”, he said.“A draft Equality Bill ... has been published, but it has not been progressed.”Bowes said law reform was “needed to address the extremely high rate of Traveller homelessness and to remove barriers to groups such as Roma accessing basic public services”.The statement to the UN will note that despite the adoption of a new Traveller and Roma inclusion strategy in the Republic, “there remain major barriers to Travellers and Roma accessing housing and social security”. Since an independent review identified an “extremely high rate of Traveller homelessness” in 2019 and called for comprehensive reform of the laws concerning Traveller accommodation and evictions, there has been “no such law reform”, the statement notes.Bowes also called for the State “to treat legal aid as an essential public service and set out a timeline for comprehensive reform of the system”. ICCL executive director Joe O’Brien said the Republic was not immune to the global trend of backsliding on human rights and democratic freedoms. “We’ve seen worrying developments recently in Ireland, including ... moves which would hinder people’s access to justice, most notably through the proposed judicial review changes,” he added.“Ireland needs to course-correct and recommit to robustly protecting everyone’s rights and freedoms.”