On 4 June 2008, Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced his vision for the establishment of an Asia-Pacific Community. Subsequently, the Human Rights Subcommittee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade has undertaken an inquiry into international and regional human rights mechanisms and possible models for the Asia–Pacific region
The Australian Constitution says very little about human rights. In contrast to the Constitutions of most other Western countries, which list a range of rights and provide legal protection for them, the Australian Constitution includes only a small handful of provisions that deal expressly with rights
Although artificial intelligence is already mainstream, experts have only recently started looking into the short- and long-term impacts of AI on human rights. Recently in 2018, artificial intelligence was a key topic at RightsCon, a global conference on the future of the internet hosted by Access Now. There we worked with partners to draft and publish the Toronto Declaration on protecting the rights to equality and non- discrimination in machine learning systems. We then released a report in November 2018, Human Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, as a preliminary scoping of the intersection of AI and human rights
Most people care about the welfare of future generations. Parents want their children and grandchildren to live good lives. A British poll found that 64% of citizens think that the needs of future generations should take priority in the division of resources. But political and economic decisions do not reflect this concern. The reluctance of governments to adopt effective policies for mitigating climate change is the most obvious example of a failure to prevent harm to future people
Suppose that nothing much is done to prevent global warming and that the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to increase. In 2070, according to the Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the average temperature in Australia will have increased as much as 6 degrees centigrade. Australia will be drier, although floods and cyclones will occur more frequently
National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) are seen as an integral part of the protection of human rights in the 21st century. These institutions play a remarkably unique role within human rights frameworks, both globally and within individual states. Yet the importance and effectiveness of NHRIs are closely linked to how independent they are from states, in both form and practice. This chapter considers the role of NHRIs and their effectiveness in maintaining independence
Debate about human rights in Australia is often polarised. One view commonly expressed is that by Sir Robert Menzies in 1967, just retired as Prime Minister, that ‘the rights of individuals in Australia are as adequately protected as they are in any other country in the world’
Just over 20 years ago, in a small ramshackle town called Goma on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, there was the most unimaginable human catastrophe. It was the concluding days of the war that saw over 800,000 men, women and children killed at the hands of the genocidaires
At the heart of intergenerational equity is the principle that we hold the natural environment as a sacred trust that we have a duty to hand down to following generations in a state not less diminished than the one that we have enjoyed
On any interpretation, international intervention to prevent mass atrocity crimes has thus far been a failure in Libya and Syria, and in South Sudan and CAR. Crimes against humanity and war crimes continue to be committed extensively in all four countries