Castan Centre for Human Rights Law

Public Forum
Making a Real Difference to Human Rights

Speech by the Hon Alexander Downer, MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs,
at the Queen’s Hall, Parliament House, Melbourne
6 – 7pm, 20 November 2000.

Introduction

Thank you Professor Kinley; ladies and gentlemen.

It is a great pleasure to give this address and to be associated with the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law early in its young life.

Unfortunately, I was only starting to get to know Ron Castan on a personal level before his untimely death.

We worked together on a number of sensitive human rights issues to which he made an invaluable contribution.

He was appropriately described as one of Australia’s most powerful social consciences, a man who used his great legal skills to advance the interests of the disadvantaged.

His work with indigenous people was particularly significant.

There is no more appropriate name to give to Monash’s new centre than his.

Gauging by its recent activities, I have no doubt the Centre will make a vital and lasting contribution to the promotion of human rights in Australia and abroad.

I wish it every success.

I want today to take a brief, but comprehensive look at the actions our Government has taken to uphold human rights standards around the world.

I want to talk about the centrality of human rights to our foreign policy objectives, and our decision to make effectiveness the guiding principle of our actions.

I want to outline what we are doing to make multilateral human rights forums more effective, and to describe some of the actions we are taking on the bilateral front.

But first, I want to talk about what sets our Government apart on human rights issues.

Our distinctive approach

I noticed that in inviting me to give this address, Professor Kinley’s mentioned that he wanted me to speak about what he described as Australia’s distinctive approach to human rights.

I think his adjective was well chosen.

Australia does have a distinctive approach to human rights, as it has to many things.

Our human rights objectives are much the same as those of other countries which share our democratic ideals -the "like-mindeds" in diplomatic parlance - but I think it can fairly be said that we go about achieving them in a slightly different way.

Some of the explanation for this is geographic.

Burma, for example, which I will come to in a moment, is on Australia’s radar screen in a way that it can never be for Europeans, simply because we live in the same region.

And what affects the region affects Australia and colours our perspective.

Seeking a fair go for all

The second reason for our distinctive approach to human rights has more to do with an Australian way of doing things.

Our approach is pragmatic but it is also firmly rooted in an ideological commitment to liberal democratic ideals.

I believe this blend of the practical and the idealistic very much reflects the character of Australia.

A separate public forum could no doubt be dedicated to discussing what core Australian values are - or if they even exist - in the year 2000.

Personally, I have no qualms in saying that one of our abiding values is that of a fair go for all.

Australians care about human rights because they believe strongly in a fair go, they support the underdog and they take particular exception to abuses of power.

They see justice and human dignity as the self-evident right of all people.

They also prefer to cut through the rhetoric and do something useful.

There is a tendency in some circles in the developed world to see human rights as the soft underbelly of foreign policy, something that can be dispensed with when hard strategic decisions have to be made.

And in some developing countries, human rights are still seen as the soft underbelly of domestic policies: the luxury that is added on when more important things like the economy have been attended to.

Human rights – central to our policies

Both these perceptions are misguided.

Every year we see examples of governments getting into trouble when they have ignored human rights or have perpetuated a climate of impunity for serious abusers.

Eventually, official corruption, lack of accountability, the absence of a reliable legal system and the denial of political participation take their toll on social stability and galloping economies alike.

Governments often realise too late that if the institutions are not there to protect human rights, the rest will prove to have been built on sand.

This, of course, is another rendition of the principle that human rights - political, civil, economic, social and cultural rights - are indivisible, but it is too important a principle to overlook.

It lies at the heart of the emphasis we place on good governance and institution building, both in our human rights and our development cooperation policies.

And to give concrete effect to that emphasis, last financial year our Government spent more than $72 million on civil society and human rights activities in our overseas aid budget.

It is no surprise that countries which endeavour to uphold human rights, to establish well-functioning mechanisms to protect their citizens’ rights, and to advance national prosperity and development, do not disrupt international peace.

And we do not have to look further back than the last year or so to demonstrate that neglect of human rights lies at the heart of many of our most pressing foreign policy concerns.

Suppression of human rights is almost always the source and the consequence of serious civil and international conflicts.

The need for effective action

So, far from being an added-on luxury for developing countries, or the spongy side of foreign policy for developed countries, human rights are central to the maintenance of a peaceful world and our nation’s security.

It follows that it is very much in Australia’s interests for government to work out how best to deliver an effective human rights policy.

It is also, of course, in the interests of the ordinary people of the world who just want to live their lives free from the fear of poverty, war and tyranny.

But I want to emphasise the word effective because this is the litmus test for everything this government does in the human rights field.

This audience will be well acquainted with my view that you do not measure a government’s interest in human rights by the decibel reading of its public criticism of others.

You measure it by what it actually does, not what it says, although there are times for speaking up too.

Making a real difference to human rights does not mean forswearing criticism under any circumstances, but it does mean making a judgement that the criticism will have the desired - and not the opposite - effect.

This non-confrontational aspect of our approach is often put down to crass economic motives, or mistaken for "going soft" on countries with serious human rights problems.

Such criticism misses the point.

Not surprisingly, governments often behave much like the individual human beings that make them up – they respond better to encouragement and constructive assistance than they do to criticism, particularly public criticism.

If we are too careless with the national dignity of other countries, we will not advance the human dignity of their citizens one iota.

Multilateral efforts

The emphasis on effective, realisable outcomes is as important in the multilateral as it is in the bilateral sphere, although I would have to say that making a difference in bodies like the United Nations with its huge membership and complicated structures can be a daunting task.

Happily, we do not have to choose between putting our energies into bilateral or multilateral human rights work: the two should be, and often are, mutually reinforcing.

So, we backed up our commitment to governance with a diplomatic effort earlier this year to get the Commission of Human Rights to adopt a resolution linking human rights and good governance for the first time.

Of itself, the resolution is not going to make corrupt regimes change their ways, but it has added a modicum of moral suasion that was not there before.

We also work hard multilaterally to encourage the establishment of human rights institutions, including through funding for the secretariat of the Asia Pacific Forum for National Human Rights Institutions.

The Forum has now expanded to eight member countries.

On the multilateral front, we want the human rights machinery to function effectively, because the principles it is supposed to advance are too important for it to do otherwise.

The Government’s review of the UN treaty body system this year had its origins in our sense that the treaty system was not only drowning under its own weight, but had moved too far away from its original vision.

Committees were set up to advise and assist States Parties to fulfil their treaty obligations but are in practice sitting in judgement upon them, or have become too burdened to cope with the volume of reports submitted under treaty obligations.

In practice, some committees were trying so hard to be even-handed that they gave a light slap on the wrist to countries everyone agreed were serious human rights offenders, and made countries that take their treaty commitments seriously – like Australia - seem like monsters.

We want to see committees adhering to their mandates, addressing serious resource issues and the related long delays, and we want them to treat States Parties as their principal interlocutors.

We will be working with like-minded countries to achieve these objectives.

Clearly we are not turning our backs on the U.N.

The recent election of the distinguished Australian, Professor Ivan Shearer, to the Human Rights Committee demonstrated our commitment to the system and UN members’ recognition of that commitment.

So we do have grumbles about the over-loaded bureaucracy and some of the anomalies that have grown up around the UN treaty system.

At the same time, we acknowledge the contributions that the array of UN human rights standards, the international institutions, and emerging body of international law have made to the advancement of human rights.

They have palpably not rid the world of ruthless dictators or serious human right abusers.

But they have contributed to the emergence of a remarkable new human rights culture in international affairs.

Bit by bit, leaders of governments that suppress human rights are being made to feel uncomfortable, however much they bluster and hide behind sovereignty arguments.

The would-be Pol Pots and Ceaucescus are now on notice.

The Pinochets and Milosevics of the future, still in their prams, are going to grow up in an international environment that will give them pause.

They should note the lesson from recent history that those who hold onto authoritarian power by denying their people the right to participate in government, or by sheer terror, will eventually have their day of reckoning.

The International Criminal Court will make an enormous contribution to shaping this new environment by establishing a single permanent institution to deal with the most egregious offences, and by enhancing the new international culture of human rights.

I take pride in Australia’s role in the Court’s gestation and birth, which includes our chairmanship of the 60-nation like-minded group that fought so hard for an effective court.

Our innovative bilateral initiatives…

On the bilateral front, time does not allow me to do more than give you a few examples of the Government’s approach.

They are illustrative only, but give some indication of the sort of quiet work that is being done to make it possible for more countries to meet the standards of human rights adherence now expected of them, both by their citizens and by the international community.

… in Burma…

There is probably no better place to start than Burma, since our human rights initiative there has drawn a good deal of interest during the year, and since our Chairman this evening is Professor Kinley who conducted several of the human rights workshops funded by the Australian Government.

I would be the last to inflate the prospects of turning around the very poor situation in Burma, but the purpose of the initiative was always fairly straight-forward: to do something to improve the human rights of the Burmese people.

We had reached the stage when other approaches did not seem to be having the slightest effect and the old maxims about "nothing ventured nothing gained", or "a journey of a thousand miles must start with a single step" were beginning to come to mind.

The idea of suggesting to the Burmese that they establish a national human rights institution, and the proposal to conduct workshops on human rights for Burmese officials, were born out of frustration with zero progress, as much as anything else.

Some may look for darker motives, but they won’t find them.

So far, a total of 51 Burmese officials have taken part in the three workshops and benefited from the talents and knowledge of people like David Kinley here.

The workshops have covered international law and human rights treaties and, from what I have heard, the participants were keen students who were prepared to talk fairly freely about how the content of the courses related to Burma.

They came from a range of ministries and included police and prison officers.

The Burmese are under no illusions that Australia is content only to have conducted the workshops and to hear that Burma is setting up a national human rights institution.

They know that they will have to follow through with concrete action if Australia is to take our initiative forward and that we will be watching carefully to see what kind of commission is established and how it operates.

I think the Burmese also realise that after ten years of disappointment, the world is not disposed to give them the benefit of the doubt.

So the ball is very much in Burma’s court.

But regardless of what happens with this initiative overall, I find it hard to believe that giving human rights training to 51 Burmese officials with direct responsibilities in some of the most difficult areas affecting human rights could be anything other than a useful step.

If the workshops’ sole effect is to open the minds of those officials and the people associated with them to new ideas, they will have been worth having.

… in Indonesia …

In a very different context, but on a similar theme, I would like to think that a series of human rights workshops being conducted in three provincial centres of Indonesia right now with Australian Government support will ultimately have a beneficial effect on the lives of ordinary people.

Indonesia, of course, is going through an enormously difficult transition and has already put in place a range of institutions and legislative measures to address its human rights problems and past practices of impunity.

By the end of the current series of workshops some 450 Indonesian officials, members of parliament, police officers, academics and media representatives from Yogjakarta, Bandung and Semarang will have participated in three-day workshops covering the architecture of the international human rights system and the four treaties to which Indonesia is a party.

The workshops complement other human rights assistance Australia has provided to Indonesia, including to Komnas Ham, the national human rights commission.

Komnas Ham has already blazed a trail in Indonesia and will continue to play an important role in investigations into human rights abuses and developing a broader awareness of human rights issues in Indonesia.

Australian assistance to Komnas Ham is entirely practical, setting up computer data bases, staffing structures, and staff training.

I mentioned earlier the emphasis we give to institution-building and the links between good governance and human rights.

One of the institution-building steps the Government has taken has been to set up the Centre for Democratic Institutions to assist bodies in the region, such as parliaments and judiciaries, to function more effectively.

Indeed, the CDI’s establishment was an initiative which I had a strong personal interest in, and I am pleased to see that it has embarked on a substantial program of work.

I might just mention one of the Centre’s activities - once again, by way of demonstration only, and that is to assist Cambodia and PNG in drawing up an Anti-Corruption National Action Plan.

It is widely recognised that officially sanctioned corruption not only compromises the economic and social rights of a society but, by eating away at citizens’ confidence in their political processes, robs them of the full realisation of their civil and political rights as well.

In both Phnom Penh and Port Moresby, the Anti-Corruption Plans were the result of dialogue between government agencies and civil society, with the CDI providing facilitators and resource people.

The implementation of the Plans continues to be the subject of vigorous debate.

… and in China

The last example I will mention is China, with whom we have a formal human rights dialogue.

This involves regular senior level discussions with ministries and agencies responsible for the areas of principal human rights concern.

The dialogue provides a framework and an official blessing, if you like, for a range of activities called the Human Rights Technical Cooperation Program, now running at about $1 million annually.

It has a strong emphasis on legal reform, without which a better human rights situation will remain pie in the sky.

The program has also conducted activities focussing on women’s rights, particularly domestic violence, and the rights of minorities, among other issues.

One of its great strengths is the personal contact forged between practitioners in the two countries, often including relatively young people.

In the last 18 months of the Program, some 450 Chinese and 164 Australians have been directly involved in program activities.

Of course any figure in the Chinese context is a drop in the ocean, but, as elsewhere, there is always a flow-on effect.

Sometimes Australia’s activities can reinforce reforms already under way in Chinese institutions.

A case in point is the three year reform program of the supervisory body within the Chinese criminal justice system, the Supreme People’s Procuracy.

Its reform program focuses on issues of interest to our human rights program, including police corruption and the reliability of evidence, including the basis on which the guilt of a person can be properly assessed.

So a group of Australians, including Monash’s own Professor George Hampel QC, then a Supreme Court Judge, and Mr Nick Cowdrey QC, Director of the DPP, went to Henan in central China this year to conduct a course in the rules of evidence.

Thirty up-and-coming procurators from 18 Chinese provinces participated in the course, and according to one Australian participant, they were hungry to understand how evidence is tested in an adversarial system like ours.

It was a hands-on course, with a mock trial and a lot of interest in questions of how the rights of the defendant should be balanced against the rights of the victim.

None of the activities I have described, in Burma, China, Indonesia and elsewhere in the region, and beyond it through our Human Rights Small Grants Fund, are going to yield instantaneous results, and nor can they be expected to.

I would not for a minute suggest that anyone in this audience would fall for the easy logic that, because there are still political prisoners in China, or because Aung San Suu Kyi is still under de facto house arrest in Burma, the dialogue or the workshops have therefore failed.

But this sort of logic has surprising currency.

Foreign Ministers, along with educators and commentators of all kinds, have a responsibility to explain to the public that, alas, the world does not work like that.

Much as we might wish it were otherwise, it is simply not in our gift to work transformations in other countries, to command that the military or the police of other countries stop committing human rights abuses.

Australian jurisdiction stops at our borders and other nations guard their sovereignty very zealously.

What we can do is to encourage change in the right direction and provide assistance at a pace and of a kind acceptable to our partner governments, involving them at all stages in the process.

That is how progress is made.

Conclusion

As I see it, making a real difference to human rights means being patient and working with rather than against.

It means taking a few risks and being prepared for a few disappointments.

For the future, I see the Government building on the solid foundations that have been laid in the last four years.

The focus on the effective and the practical must continue.

But I have a clear bottom line, and that is to ask whether the alternative would be - or was - any better.

Until I have evidence that confrontation, isolation and unalloyed criticism work more effectively than dialogue, education and other assistance programs, I am happy to have a distinctive approach to human rights, especially since I believe it to be very much in Australia’s national interests.

Indeed, I wear it as a badge of honour.