Well, the 'rent seekers' are here again. The parasitic 'academic' and 'human rights' Advocacy crowd are here to save us all from the wicked 'others'.

The only and most recent attempt at infringement of my 'human rights' was the attempt at curtailing my freedom of speech, through recent media reform legislation.

The deafening silence from the Australian Human Rights Commission attests to the usefulness of this mob.

"This dialogue project between academics, community based advocates and citizens will help focus attention on the relationships between people exercising their rights and those who owe a duty to them to have their rights protected."

Give us a break.

International Human Rights treaties require four actions to become operative.

1. Signing the treaty.
2. Ratifying the treaty.
3. Enabling legislation so the rights in the treaty become part of domestic law.
4. Responding to reports by monitoring agencies that the treaty has been violated outside Australia.

Without step 3 those whose rights have been violated have no recourse in the law of Australia.

Without step 4 those whose rights have been violated have no recourse in international law.

In the Bougainville conflict, Australia was condemned several times by the UN rapporteur for supporting the blockade. Australia simply ignored the condemnations.

Steps 3 and 4 must be taken to implement the treaties. In general they haven't been.

Prompete,
Too right, here again we have the issue of defining who is "we".
Middle class human rights advocates are not part of my world but refugees, immigrants and Aboriginals are, these are the groups I encounter on a daily basis.
The relative successes of our version of a tolerant multiracial society are the sole property of the "masses", not the gilded youths of academia and the various grievance industries which have proliferated under the framework of "rights".
They waffle on to each other and produce torrents of self congratulatory documents such as the above but go down to any Westfield on a saturday morning and ask the "people" to *snerk* name their favourite human rights advocate .
"Daddy,when I grow up I want to be just like Marcus Einfeld!"....it is to laugh.

The obvious defect of this article and its theory of human rights is that they don't define what a right or a human right is.

Also they need a theory of the State. Being the most powerful group in society, it is obviously implicated in the problems, as well as the solutions, in issues of rights. You can't just assume that a right is whatever the State says it is, as the authors assume, because if that were true, there would be no need for any State action to protect rights. It is a philosophy of unlimited arbitrary power, a blank warrant for abuses.

Of course that is nothing but a moral theory that might is right. This is in fact the opposite of a moral theory of rights. It's what a moral theory of rights is supposed to protect us against - the strongest and most aggressive party merely unilaterally dictating terms, expropriating, and requiring obedience from everyone else on a double standard.

What the authors are on about is not human rights at all, but a political agenda of forced handouts to benefit favoured minorities. What about the human rights of the majority whose efforts are to be forcibly expropriated to pay for their opinions? Has it ever occurred to them that people have a human right to be free from their violent interferences?

The purpose of the article can be found in this one sentence of theirs:

"Many of the restrictions and controls placed on people with disabilities, the 'treatment' of those refugees and asylum-seekers held in detention, the recurring and intransigent socio-economic deprivation of our Indigenous population are unseen and unpublished."

I have to agree with the above poster. What a "right" or "human right" is has not been defined. But from the quotation above, we get an idea of the barrow they're pushing. I guess by making "rights" so vague it can't be used by the Australian population against the claims made by lawyers and academics. Because, then the "rights" of Australians forking out billions of dollars to asylum seekers and foreign aid would be questioned.

Ahhhh, Virtue Vampires gathering around the Jugular of society. As useful as their highly paid assistance to the Aboriginal community which has mainly gone to Progressive "White Fellas".