Human Rights in Australia

In the Seventeenth article of Universal Declaration of Human Rights it states, “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”

Human rights are the minimum entitlements or standards that are recognized internationally as applying to all people. The Australian Government and many other nations have acknowledges that these rights are natural and universal by ratifying international instruments that outline minimum human rights standards. Relevant refers to which Australia has ratified include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Convent on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

These are devices are relevant to native title in that they protect property against arbitrary and discriminatory interference and articulate rights to freedom of religion and culture. It is the expectation of the international community that Australia will comply with these standards in its treatment of the rights of Indigenous peoples.

As a body of norms or rules human rights belong, as the previous section makes clear, to the whole of humanity. The possession and entitlement to exercise human rights is invested in all of us. We all have the same basic rights. We share the right to equality, not to be discriminated against on irrelevant grounds, we all possess the rights to life, to liberty, to be free from torture, to practice religion, to privacy and to found a family, to free speech, to be educated, to have access to water and sustenance, to health care and to a clean environment. The right to have our individual dignity respected belongs to each one of us.

Without the recognition of these rights and their adequate protection human society would simply not exist. At the board level, therefore, the “use” of human rights is that through them we become more truly human and our societies worth living in. That, in short, is their importance.

The unique position of Indigenous peoples is recognized in the specific rights afforded to them in order to establish their equal right to have their cultural mores and their traditional practices respected and protected. The united Nations Draft Declaration on the rights of Indigenous People stresses not only the fundamental right to equality for the world’s Indigenous people but also the special protection required if they are to be able to practice their culture, including their particular association with land and to exercise their right to self determination in political, economic and social terms.

At the domestic level, the special protection needs of these fundamental rights are recognized, to different degrees, in the common law (including the Mabo and Wik cases), the various land acts (including the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth)) and Indigineous heritage statutues.

There are many different laws that provide protection for human rights in Australia. These laws however, cannot be viewed in isolation the legal system and society in with they operate. For it is this context that provides the shape of out human rights protection, by way of the wider moral and social obligations we all free to respect such rights. In this way, the law acts as both a reflection