Page 3650 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 26 August 2008
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Nonetheless, it is deplorable that the government has not even acknowledged these human rights implications in its explanatory material, and the Attorney-General has only made passing references to any human rights implications in his speeches on these bills.
By failing to advocate on behalf of its own Human Rights Act, the government weakens the status of that legislation. We still have an opposition that apparently opposes the Human Rights Act and has said it will revoke it if they come to power. Merely appending a minimalist compatibility statement that legislation is in accordance with the Human Rights Act is, as I have said before, a waste of paper when the arguments defending those assertions are not made public. This shabby treatment of its own Human Rights Act makes me question the government’s true commitment or even understanding of the responsibility that it bears to uphold and nurture these principles.
I am not alone in fearing that the government’s commitment to its own Human Rights Act is compromised by considerations of political expediency. I am also not alone in suspecting that the spate of tough-on-crime bills rushed through this house in the last couple of sitting weeks of this Assembly in part represents a political stunt by the Stanhope government to attract votes from the sadly and inappropriately named Liberal Party. It is sobering to think that some of these amendments may also have been drafted in order to achieve better conviction rate statistics in future.
The Attorney-General’s 10-second sound grab, which seems to be what we hear instead of a more reasoned justification, is:
Human rights does not only mean the human rights of criminals. The human rights of the victims are also important.
Indeed, that is true. The trouble is, no-one is arguing with that proposition. It sounds like the catchy slogan you might read on Pauline Hanson’s website. Of course the human rights of victims are important. Justice is not served by placing unreasonable obstacles in the path of law enforcement agencies which are seeking to obtain criminal convictions.
But these arguments which seek to achieve a balance between defence and prosecution advantage are nothing new. Contemporary criminal processes are the result of tensions that have been played out in English common law jurisdictions for hundreds of years. The government should not be tampering with these processes without considerable justification.
The arguments in the explanatory material are primarily self-serving. They are more political arguments than jurisprudential reasoning. Last week the Chief Minister said that MLAs had no place interpreting legislation. But if he paused for a minute to reflect and think before leaping to attack his real and imaginary detractors, he would have to see that, for most of our working hours, we are engaged in making statutory interpretations and satisfying ourselves that particular statutory clauses achieve the effect that we hope they will. It is our job.
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