About the Project
There has been considerable debate in Australia over the extent to which parliaments and the democratic processes do a good job promoting and protecting human rights. Some argue that parliaments ignore the interests of minorities or the politically powerless and provide inadequate protection of rights. Others argue that Australia’s generally good performance in the area of human rights demonstrates the adequacy of the existing mechanisms. Academics have also joined this debate at a theoretical level, with some arguing that a democratically elected parliament is the only body with the legitimacy to make controversial moral choices about the how to apply rights in specific, complex situations.Despite this political and academic debate there has been no comprehensive, empirical research into the adequacy of the methods that parliaments employ to ensure the protection of human rights in the various Australian jurisdictions. This project, funded by the Australian Research Council, seeks to fill that gap.
This project is investigating all the existing parliamentary and pre-parliamentary mechanisms for ensuring that proposed legislation is compliant with rights. In most jurisdictions these mechanisms include a parliamentary scrutiny committee with primary responsibility for checking legislation against (often vague) rights criteria. In some jurisdictions there is also consideration of rights at other stages of the legislative process, for example, in the Cabinet approval process or in other parliamentary committees. The project combines a review of the parliamentary records of selected Australian parliaments with interviews of key parliamentary stakeholders. It aims to identify the capacity and effectiveness of Australian parliaments and, through a comparative study, to compare their performance with world's best practice.