Australia's Sixth Periodic Review
Learn more about the Commission's update to the Committee against Torture on the implementation of recommendations from their Concluding Observations.
Learn more about the Commission's update to the Committee against Torture on the implementation of recommendations from their Concluding Observations.
Homelessness has, I'm sure, been on your agendas for many years. More recently, both Parity and the Rudd federal government (if I can put you both in the same league) has given it a much increased focus. Today, I want to identify the many human rights issues raised in the context of homelessness, and suggest how a human rights framework would help address what is an ever-increasing problem in our society.
In the contemporary world, and particularly amongst developed economies, many of us believed that the culture of civil liberties, freedoms and non-discrimination are reasonably well established and these precepts have clear links to innovation, creativity and the broader concepts of economic productivity and a well functioning civil society. Indeed, I believe that many of us had come to accept and expect this to be the situation, and that conferences like the one we attend here today could be built on this very premise.
Forty eight years ago this Tuesday, on December 10 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration was a response to the trauma that many of the worlds nations had experienced in World War II. The trauma was especially strong among the nations of Europe, particularly because of the Holocaust, but it was also evident in East Asia, South Asia, South East Asia and the Pacific.