Recently, the GLaD team have led or contributed to several submissions to law reform, human rights, and parliamentary inquiries. In this post, we summarise some of these submissions and highlight opportunities for law reform on gender and drugs.
Australian Law Reform Commission
The Australian Law Reform Commission is currently conducting an inquiry into justice responses to sexual violence. The inquiry forms part of the Australian Government’s commitment to strengthen and harmonise sexual assault and consent laws (following the Senate inquiry into current and proposed sexual consent laws in Australia), and to improve outcomes and experiences for victim-survivors in the justice system.
Our submission makes several recommendations on improvements to:
- court processes for complainants;
- jury directions;
- outcomes through education, specialisation, and accreditation;
- victim impact statements;
- compensation and civil litigation responses to sexual violence;
- outcomes for victim-survivors through compensation schemes; and
- victims of crime commissioners.
The Commission is due to report by July 2025.
Australian Human Rights Commission
The Australian Human Rights Commission is currently conducting a national project mapping threats to trans and gender diverse human rights in Australia. The project aims to map current and emerging threats to trans and gender diverse human rights, such as actions, circumstances, events, forces, groups, situations, trends, and other phenomena that endanger or violate trans and gender diverse human rights.
Our submission noted at the outset that the framing of ‘trans and gender diverse human rights’ is reductive and potentially counter-productive as it (wrongly) implies that there is a collection of human rights that accrue only to trans and gender diverse people that are often juxtaposed to the human rights of other people. A stronger framing would be ‘human rights of trans and gender diverse people’, which acknowledges that universal human rights apply to trans and gender diverse people rather than specific (and narrow) ‘trans and gender diverse human rights’.
Our submission also recommends that:
- the Australian Human Rights Commission should be empowered to examine proposed legislation or acts that may endanger human rights without Ministerial approval, report on these matters publicly, and (where relevant) make enforceable undertakings with duty-holders to prevent or remedy human rights violations;
- compensation payments recommended by the Commission should be enforceable and binding, and there should be a requirement that persons found to have violated human rights report to the Commission on any remedial action taken in response;
- the Commission should inquire into whether states and territories meet human rights benchmarks for healthcare access for trans and gender diverse prisoners, whether state and territory police are appropriately trained on indicia of LGBTIQA+ hate crime, and whether state and territory laws recognise those in unregistered relationships or in ‘chosen families’ as next of kin;
- the Commission should report that the Western Australian and New South Welsh laws that require trans and gender diverse people to undergo surgical procedures to update their sex on birth certificates are inconsistent with human rights; and
- the Commonwealth Parliament should enact a charter of human rights (a recommendation that has been taken up by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights in response to our next submission).
Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights
We have previously written about our submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry into Australia’s human rights framework.
The Committee has released its report and recommended the establishment of a national Human Rights Act, with an example Human Rights Bill included in their report. Our submission is cited three times in the report regarding discrimination, harassment and violence experienced by the LGBTIQA+ community as well as the importance of peak and peer organisations receiving training to better advocate for human rights in the delivery of services; and was one of 87.2% of submissions that supported the adoption of federal protection of human rights via a Human Rights Act.
The Committee also recommend several reforms to the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny Act) 2011 that reflect several of our recommendations, including:
- requiring statements of compatibility to contain a description of the nature of any consultation undertaken on the bill, which should enable peak and peer organisations to provide expert advice and lived experience on legislation; and
- reforms to ensure that bills that require the committee’s detailed consideration may not proceed until after the committee reports, which should provide clearer timelines for scrutiny processes.
The Australian Government is due to provide a response by August 2024, but no response has yet been provided.