How do we take the principled, visionary aspirations of international human rights instruments and bake them into our everyday legal systems?
That was the question facing the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee after Australia endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Declarations like UNDRIP aren’t legally binding – even as a signatory Australia is free to ignore it – which makes directly adopting UNDRIP’s principles into our domestic legal system critical.
The Federation had some ideas.
Our submission articulated a solid and complementary legal underpinning for enacting UNDRIP in Australian law. It covered:
- What UNDRIP is, and why it’s not legally enforceable
- How UNDRIP ideas have been adopted in legislation, policy and settlement agreements in Australia, New Zealand and Canada
- The opportunities and limitations of enacting UNDRIP within Victoria’s policy framework
- How UNDRIP rights could be enshrined through treaty processes (including by containing UNDRIP rights as enforceable rights in treaties and enacting an UNDRIP compatibility law).
Just recognising rights isn’t the goal – what we ultimately need to see is the exercise of those rights. Embedding UNDRIP into domestic Australian law as we outlined would be an important step towards realising this goal.
Read the submission
