Why Should You Care About Human Rights? [S2-06]

Show Notes

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Music: “Insurrection”
Written by Pierre Chrétien
Performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra
Courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Transcript

Luke
Welcome to another episode of Why Can’t They Just, looking at politics, policy and getting stuff done. I’m Luke Robertson, I’m a conservation biology and environmental policy student in Sydney, as well as a member of the Labor Party and LEAN.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, I’m also a member of the Labor Party. I’m a former diplomat and a climate, environment and anti-racism activist.

Before we start, I would like to acknowledge that Luke and I are both recording this on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia, recognising that sovereignty was never ceded, we extend our respects to their Elders, past and present, and to any First Nations listeners that we have today.

Luke
So today we are talking about human rights. Currently in Australia, Angus Taylor, the Leader of the Opposition, is talking about making continued citizenship conditional on continued adherence to Australian values, talking also about the notion of ‘bad countries’, implying that people from those countries are inherently bad. And that’s only one half of the new right wing pie, with Pauline Hanson also labelling entire religions as inherently bad, showing that she has not changed since her maiden speech in 1996. With both of these people threatening to destroy the notion of citizenship, why is it so important that we uphold it?

Janaline
So what citizenship really means is that your country is going to do certain things to protect you. That your country, represented by your government, sees a responsibility for your welfare. Now that is most evident overseas, where if you get into trouble you can go to your embassy and usually they will give you some advice or assistance. But also at home it entitles you to things like social welfare. In a democracy, you can vote, you can stand for office. In some countries, like Australia, you get access to public health care, public education.

So citizenship has a long history. In Roman times, being a Roman citizen meant that you could not be enslaved. It meant that you could not be imprisoned without due process. It meant you were exempt from certain forms of torture. That was one of the reasons that exile was one of the worst punishments that could be delivered, because it actually stripped those protections from you.

One of the most fundamental rights of an Australian citizen is being able to come back to Australia and to live and work in Australia. During COVID that was temporarily suspended for public health reasons, and I think we’ve said on a previous episode that one of the reasons that so many people came into Australia during the two years after COVID was because a lot of them were Australian citizens who had not been able to come home for a couple of years.

There’s been a debate in Australia where the Opposition has said the government shouldn’t allow the families of Islamic State fighters in Syria to come back to Australia, even though they are Australian citizens. The Australian government has no power to stop citizens from coming back to Australia, and, in fact, almost all of those families are now back. There is a strong national security case for bringing them back because, at some point, the children, when they grow up, could come back to Australia. Surely it is better for Australia’s national security and community safety to have them brought up in Australia, to have them put through an Australian education system, to be accepted into the Australian community, to go through deradicalisation programs.

If their mothers are found to have committed crimes, then they should go through the Australian criminal justice system. And that is a much better way of ensuring we can actually exercise some influence over their actions, their decision making. And hopefully, welcome back into a society so that they actually want to contribute to the society and not harm it.

The worst terrorist attack on Australian soil occurred in Bondi in December 2025, when fifteen people were killed by two gunmen. That was an absolutely shocking and tragic event. The worst terrorist attack committed against Australians was in Bali in 2012, when over 200 people were killed when a nightclub was bombed. That was a deliberate attack against Australians. So stopping people from coming to Australia doesn’t necessarily stop them from hurting Australians.

The other thing is that this idea of conditional citizenship is also highly problematic. Why is that? Well, because if you’re an Australian citizen, you’re an Australian citizen.

I think it is very reasonable for the Australian government, as it does, to require people wanting to come to Australia on visas to agree to uphold Australian values, which are listed on the Department of Home Affairs website and which talk about things like compassion, and non-discrimination and supporting democratic values. But, once you become an Australian citizen, you are an Australian citizen. It doesn’t matter where you come from. It doesn’t matter what your ethnic background is. And it doesn’t matter what anybody else who shares that ethnic background, language, history, or cultural background or religion ever does. That should not affect your right to be an Australian citizen.

So I do recall, a few years ago, Peter Dutton, who was then Home Affairs Minister, talking about ‘second generation Lebanese’, because there had been a couple of people of that description who had been charged with terrorism offences. Bill Shorten, who was then the Labor leader of the opposition, stood up and said ‘Hmm, second generation Lebanese. You know, mate, in the Labor Party, we have a word for those people. We call them Australians.’

That was a really good statement of exactly what it should mean to be Australian. And I would note that at the same time that Peter Dutton was making these calls about second generation Lebanese, there was a raft of convictions of Catholic priests from Ireland for horrendous child sex offences.

Now nobody suggested at that time that there should be restrictions on people from Ireland, or men from Ireland, or Catholic priests from Ireland. And nor should there be. People from Ireland should not be held accountable for the actions of individual compatriots, any more than people from Lebanon should be held accountable for the actions of their compatriots.

Luke
Yeah, so much of this is built on the rocky foundations of alternative history, you know, like the Southern Cross flag and the Eureka stockade. In the heads of people who fly these flags at, you know, the March for Australia anti-migrant protest, forget - in their heads, to them, it was all white people sticking it to the government. But of course it wasn’t, it was an incredibly diverse migrant coalition.

Australia has a migrant history, of course, and the framing of migration by these groups, in terms of ‘bad countries’ and ‘bad religions’ turns it into a disgusting social debate that deliberately erases history. Who do these people think the Snowy was built by, or why the Ghan railway is called the Ghan? This alternative history and the alternative ‘facts’ around it, erase the history of this country into an idealised version that fits their own ideology.

So Janaline, you’ve talked about the history of human rights. But living in Australia, it feels as if one of those rights is the right to participate in democracy and elections. But of course, many nations do not have that same privilege. So how do the concepts of democracy and human rights interact?

Janaline
Democracy is obviously very important. Democratic systems are definitely better historically at delivering rights to their people. But democracy is not enough to protect human rights. Democracy is essentially a way of organising yourself politically so that the wishes and the priorities of the majority can be reflected in the policies and decisions of their government. Now that is really important to do in terms of things like budget allocations, in terms of the relative weight given to social services, or national defence. It’s not enough to protect human rights. Why is that? Because it doesn’t necessarily protect unpopular minorities.

During the 2010s, in Myanmar, where there was a concerted, government-endorsed campaign of persecution against the Rohingya Muslim minority, that was supported by around 80% of the population. The persecution was horrendous. People were killed, tortured, raped, and millions of them fled.

Luke
Yes I certainly don’t think democracy inherently protects minorities, particularly, as you said, many who are deemed unpopular by the majority. I think that certainly exists throughout history, with the treatment of First Nations peoples here, in Canada, in the US, and of course the treatment of black Americans in the United States were justified with the notion of democracy. I think we’re still seeing that in the modern day, such as in India, with greater persecution of the Muslim minority and of course in the Middle East with the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Janaline
The history of individual human rights and the history of democracy have developed kind of in parallel, but also kind of independently.

In Western Europe, the Magna Carta in 1215 established that a free man could not be imprisoned without due process and the judgement of his peers. During the 18th century, during the French and American Revolutions, things like the Declaration of the Rights of Man established rights such as freedom of speech and assembly.

The internationalisation of human rights was strongly related to armed conflict. The horrors of the Crimean War in the mid-19th century led to the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross which then developed some rules which eventually came enshrined into the Geneva Conventions, particularly famously dealing with the treatment of prisoners of war and the treatment of civilians in a conflict zone.

After the Second World War, the Australian Foreign Minister, Doc Evatt, and the United States First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, essentially created between them the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And this was a response to the Holocaust, it was a response to basically a lot of the atrocities that had occurred and been witnessed in those two devastating wars.

And the most important thing about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, in my view, not necessarily the articulation of what those rights are, but the really fundamental concepts that human rights are, firstly, universal, which means everybody has them. If you are a human, you have these rights.

Secondly, they are individual, which means they are not contingent on what group you come from, on what religion you are, on which country you were born in. They belong to you, individually, regardless of the actions of any other member of any group that you might be associated with. And this is really important because, in authoritarian states, you know China frequently says ‘well, the Chinese people have the right to a stable society, and this means that we, the Chinese Communist Party, should be allowed to suppress dissent, because that destroys stability. And if in the process, some individuals have their rights compromised, then, well, that is for the good of the rest of society.’

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights fundamentally rejects that premise. It says every single individual human has these rights, and holds the right as an individual. So you cannot collectively punish someone because of some action of a member of their family or a member of their community, or a member of their religion.

The last really important concept is that human rights are inalienable. And this is important because what it means is that, regardless of what you may have done, you still have these human rights. And that means, not that you can’t be punished, but it means that you should be punished after a due process has established that you were guilty of whatever you’re accused of, and the punishment fits the crime for the specific individual.

There have been discussions over the years, particularly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, famously, a number of people in the Bush Administration were talking about the sort of ‘ticking time bomb’, where if you could torture this information out of a terrorist, you could stop an imminent attack. There has never been any evidence that that has been successful. In fact, in cases where people are tortured, they tell their torturers what they think the torturers want to hear, and it doesn’t necessarily correlate with anything in real life.

And this is in fact one of the reasons that the US Field Manual for military operations has basically always said that torture is not an effective interrogation tool, because the information that comes from it is not reliable.

But why would it matter, I mean, if someone’s a terrorist, maybe they have forfeited their rights? But how do you know that this individual that you have in your custody is actually a terrorist? You can only know that if you’ve done a proper investigation and after a proper due process. And there are multiple examples of people swept up in the US War on Terror, and sent to Guantanamo, and subjected to some pretty awful conditions, who were later found not to have anything at all to do with terrorism.

So the genius of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is that it cuts through all of this by stating simply and clearly that human rights are universal, individual and inalienable. And what that means, the consequence of that, is that everybody is entitled to due process, and everybody is entitled to be judged as an individual for their own individual actions and decisions and not collectively punished for anybody else’s.

Luke
So it’s clear just how vital it is to have inalienable rights that apply to everyone and that nation states actually respect them. But right now, both globally and here in Australia, we’re watching far right populism gain ground as mainstream conservatism gets hollowed out. And the central focus for all of these movements? Migration.

You see it in the UK with Reform pledging to deport refugees. In Germany, the AfD is talking about ‘remigrating’ people they decide haven’t assimilated. In France, the National Rally wants to cut migrants off from social programs, and of course in the US, Donald Trump is carrying out mass deportations.

Those same themes are ringing true in the rhetoric of both the Coalition and One Nation. Given all of this, how do the foundational concepts of human rights that we’ve talked about apply to the political debates happening in Australia today?

Janaline
So I think in terms of Australia, and the political debates, I think it is deeply worrying that we have, not just One Nation basically saying that an entire religion should be banned from Australia, but we also have the Leader of the Opposition, the leader of the so-called mainstream major party, the Liberal Party, which has governed Australia for more than half of the last 80 years, I really think it is worrying that they are talking about judging people from where they come from. I mean it is barely disguised racist dog-whistling. For Angus Taylor to say ‘well, I think we should discriminate on the basis of adherence to Australian values, and I think we can assume that people who come from liberal democracies are more likely to adhere to those values than people who don’t’, than people who come from so-called ‘bad countries’, and he actually name-checked Iran.

Now, most Iranian Australians that I know are deeply committed to democracy and, in fact, the experience of their compatriots in Iran has only reinforced their commitment to democracy and human rights, because they have seen and they have deep knowledge of what happens when those rights are violated.

I feel like, talking about people in that very collectivist way actually seriously does violate this idea that human rights are individual. If you have someone who is now, apparently, the most popular politician in Australia, saying ‘there are no good Muslims’, that is a pretty big violation of the Australian values that are on the Department of Home Affairs website, that explicitly says that we do not discriminate on the basis of ethnic origin or religion.

So I really would like some of those political leaders who are saying these things, who are demonising whole sections of the Australian community, and who, at the same time, are saying we should be withdrawing the citizenship of people who don’t subscribe to Australian values - I wish they would look very closely at the Australian values articulated on the Department of Home Affairs website and genuinely interrogate whether they themselves are adhering to those values.

Luke
As the rhetoric around the world becomes worse, history begins to rhyme. Where could all of this take us in its most radical form?

Janaline
I mean it terrifies me to think about what the consequences might be because history rhyming is not taking us to a good place. The fundamental issue is that dehumanisation of other human beings, subscribing to the idea that some people should not have rights, and some people are less human than other people has led to literal genocide, right? So the Rwanda genocide. One of the, one of the big pieces of propaganda through that was labelling people as cockroaches. And that was a way in which you could remove yourself from the idea that what you were doing was to another human being. Because fundamentally, I think there is a kind of natural moral inhibition in humans against harming other humans. So how do we deal this? We pretend that the people we are harming are not actually people, that they’re not actually humans.

You know, in the Vietnam War, US troops called the enemy Viet Cong ‘goons’ to dehumanise them, to essentially justify terrible acts against them. So this is kind of the slippery slope that we can end with. The Jews in Nazi Germany were constantly dehumanised. They were considered - you know, they were put into cattle trucks. They were - there was a huge propaganda effort to strip them of their humanity within the minds of ordinary people. So it’s a really terrible, terrible potential outcome here. I don’t think it ends anywhere good.

Luke
Yeah, there’s a good episode of Black Mirror, I’m not sure if you’ve seen it, called Men Against Fire, where the premise is that the army, I think the American army is in a war and they’re wearing these glasses that make them see the people they’re killing as aliens. They refer to them as roaches. And then when one of their glasses breaks and they take them off and see that they’re just humans and they, they physically stop themselves from, you know, going out and killing those people.

That does segue to a good poem, by Martin Niemoeller, who was himself a clergyman during WW2, and is condemning himself and other German intellectuals and clergymen in allowing and being complicit in the Nazi’s rise to power.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me. And there was no-one left to speak out for me.

Janaline
Yeah, this poem appears on Holocaust Museums all over the world. It’s tremendously famous. And what it basically says is, fundamentally, if one group of people does not have rights, then no group of people is going to have rights. Because eventually, you are going to end up being one of those people who doesn’t have rights. So essentially I think human rights have to be universal or they are nowhere, they are nothing. If they don’t apply to everybody, by virtue of being human, how do you determine who has rights and who doesn’t? It will depend. Who decides? Is it just people who have power? Is it just people who have good weapons who decide who has rights and who doesn’t have rights?

So I think that was one of the most important developments in that whole creation of that international human rights architecture, was the idea that human rights are universal and individual. That you cannot be punished for the actions of someone else in your group, but also that, it doesn’t matter what group you belong to, you still have human rights. Those are really really important concepts.

You know, because I was a diplomat for a long time, one of the issues that I did take some interest in was the concept of diplomatic immunity. Now, diplomatic immunity is not a thing that has always been recognised. Being an ambassador in earlier times was a pretty perilous profession. It was pretty common for monarchs to take other countries’ ambassadors hostage, to imprison them, to torture them and to kill them in pretty horrible ways. The concept of diplomatic immunity came up because it became impossible for countries to actually conduct diplomacy while ambassadors were being kidnapped, tortured and murdered. And finally I think rulers understood that this was actually against their interests because it closed off opportunities for dialogue and closed off opportunities not to engage in incredibly costly wars. So the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations gives diplomats basically blanket immunity.

Now, that can be waived, if a diplomat comes into your country and murders someone, or steals something or commits some other crime, it is possible for their country to waive their diplomatic immunity and that has happened on numerous occasions where diplomats have done bad things. But it really has to be respected by the host country because otherwise everybody is at risk. So, you know, oh but shouldn’t diplomatic immunity just be automatically cancelled if a diplomat is involved in terrorism? Well, certainly if a diplomat is involved in terrorism, they should probably have their immunity waived, and they should be punished. But, if you unilaterally waive that as a host government, well what’s to stop another host government from randomly accusing one of your diplomats of terrorism? Because once you waive immunity you remove that due process requirement.

So it’s really important that even people accused of the worst possible crimes actually have these rights. Because you need to be sure that you’re punishing the right person. And that’s not to say they shouldn’t be punished. They absolutely should. There is a criminal justice system for a reason. And when I say that I should have the right as an Australian citizen to be a psychopath or to commit horrible crimes and still be an Australian citizen, I’m not saying that that means that being a psychopath or committing horrible crimes is a thing that is ok and that I shouldn’t be punished for it. I absolutely should. But I should be punished through the criminal justice system. I should not be punished by having my fundamental human rights withdrawn.

Because fundamental human rights doesn’t mean that you can’t be punished for doing stuff, it just means that you have to have been put through some kind of process that establishes that it was actually you.

Luke
Well I think all we’ve discussed today is incredibly important, particularly given the historical context around which these concepts are built. I think it’s important that we treat these discussions for what they are, and do not allow the sort of dog-whistling and racist rhetoric that comes from a lot of these people so that we do not fall down that same slope that has seen the persecution of so many minorities around the world.

Janaline
Yeah, obviously I feel this pretty intensely, as one of the targets of some of those dog-whistles. I’ve got to say though, it is so important that people remember that, if human rights don’t apply to some people, at some point, they are going to be one of those ‘some people’. If human rights don’t apply to some people, then they don’t - eventually, they don’t apply to anyone. And I just feel that is so, so, so important. And we cannot rely on majorities to protect minorities. We really need to have a robust system that actually looks at people as individuals, judges them as individuals for their actions, and not for who they are, whom they’re related to, or who shares their religion, or who shares their ethnic origin.

I think these are just some very fundamental concepts that people kind of pay lip service to, they kind of acknowledge. They see them in these value statements issued by the Department of Home Affairs. But I think it is really important for everyone in this country to deeply internalise that and deeply understand that this matters to you, it matters to every single person in this country, and it applies to every single person in this country.

Luke
Well that wraps up another episode of Why Can’t They Just? Our theme music for this program is a piece called Insurrection by Pierre Chrétien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right Music Inc. I’m Luke Robertson.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?