As a key player in the negotiations to the United Nations Declaration, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2023, Australia wholeheartedly subscribed to its text and its spirit. The drafters of the Declaration undertook the task of drafting the human rights principles that would establish pathways for world peace and individual human flourishing, with a “never again” attitude towards the horrors that the world had just lived through.
Thirty-two years later, Australia transformed the Declaration’s expression of principle into binding vows, when ratifying the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). This is an instrument of even greater importance, as a treaty, creating obligation and accountability to all other treaty parties, and supposedly providing lasting assurance to all Australians that their own country had linked arms with others across the globe to secure for them each of the human rights enshrined in the ICCPR.
Nothing has changed in the last 75 years to devalue the vital importance of those human rights. But it’s true to say that the weight and consequence of fundamental freedoms are of greatest value whenever it is necessary to entreat a country to observe them. The purpose of the ICCPR was to put rights within the reach of the individual when denied to them. These rights are not simply ornamental or aspirational but are meant to be real, tangible and assertable.
Unfortunately, successive Australian governments have failed to achieve ICCPR compliance in law, for freedom of religion and expression. In 1980, when Australia ratified the ICCPR, those particular freedoms were not especially under threat here, and certainly not in the way that they have been in recent decades.
Things are different now. Despite the well wishes at Christmas time, politicians and
