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instrument in righting wrongs as long as it’s used in a considered way.
As someone who has worked so extensively in human rights from its somewhat fl edgling beginnings, how far has Australia come in this area and what more needs to be done?
There has been a tremendous
development. We still don’t have a Bill of Rights and we’re the only Commonwealth country that does not. But Australia does have some very strong anti-discrimination legislation at the state, territory and federal level. What is lacking in one respect, a Bill of Rights, is to a large extent compensated for by this very strong anti-discrimination legislation which gives people the right to make a formal complaint if they’re being discriminated against.
A Bill of Rights would represent a huge step forward but remember that words on paper only go so far; what is really needed is the implementation of the words in a proper and reasonable fashion. The way to ensure that is education. That’s what I feel is the real key to this. For many people human rights is a weasel word; it’s something that is foreign to Australia and when you really think about it that’s not the case, it is quintessentially Australian: it’s all about giving people a fair go.
Your work in human rights law in recent years has extended far beyond Australian borders through your work with the International Bar Association (IBA). How did you come to be involved with the IBA?
I fi rst got involved with the IBA in 1993 through a colleague at QUT who was already a member. I was writing my doctoral thesis at the time through Dalhousie University in Canada.
I was going to Canada to see my supervisor and discuss my thesis and in 1993 the IBA’s annual conference was in New Orleans. A colleague of mine, Lyndal Taylor, encouraged me to go to the IBA conference.
The IBA was starting a discrimination law committee and I was encouraged by Lyndal to give a paper at a session being held by the committee. This is where I got my start with the IBA and not long after giving the paper, I was asked to become the chair of this newly established committee.
What we developed on the committee was a project on discrimination in the legal profession, which nobody had ever done before. It resulted in a set of guidelines that are now IBA guidelines on non-discrimination in the legal profession. It took quite a few years to negotiate agreement on them but we did and they were one of the fi rst international guidelines which talked about the fact that lawyers themselves should abide by these norms and principles rather than just advising clients about them.
You eventually progressed through the IBA ranks to become the Director of its Human Rights Institute. One of your most signifi cant achievements in this position to date was the establishment of a bar association in Afghanistan. How did you come be involved in such a project?
In 2002 after the Taliban fell and the Bonn Accords were agreed upon, one pillar of the Accords was to re-establish justice and the rule of law in Afghanistan. The IBA is a member of a body called the International Legal Assistance Consortium (ILAC), whose job, in part, is to deal with post-confl ict countries and re-establish the rule of law. ILAC sent a scoping mission into Afghanistan in 2002 and the report from that mission contained two recommendations: one was to set up a bar association , because they had never had one there, and the other was to establish a legal aid system.
The IBA was given the job of setting up the bar association. That job landed on my desk: I was basically told: ‘go and set up a bar association in Afghanistan’. What we do in situations like that is to hire someone to work on site for six or 12 months. In 2003 I went with our fi rst consultant, a young lawyer named Neil Gilmore, and at the time there were no commercial fl ights into and out of Kabul—you had to obtain special permission to use the UN fl ights. Fortunately, we were able to get into Afghanistan on one of these fl ights with the help of the EU.
In those days Kabul still displayed many of the signs of the confl ict that had occurred: there were bullet holes in the sides of buildings and there were no banks (to run the project I had to actually carry money, about $10,000 in small bills at a time, as there were no banks to make any electronic transfers). I remember as we were landing at the airport there were still planes which had been shot down still
MAR–MAY 2012
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