Who fears a Declaration of Citizens’ Rights’

By Safwan Zabalawi

According to some politicians opposed to a Bill of Rights, your rights as an Australian citizen are not really your own rights. For them, citizens’ rights constitute something for the government to play with, to ‘grant’ as a gift or to deny altogether.

Such a superficial understanding of human rights is apparent in the introduction of the right to vote for Aboriginal people. This natural human right was simply denied in some Australian states but somehow ‘granted’ by others until Robert Menzies called a referendum which settled the contradictions positively.

The mentality of ‘granting’ or ‘opposing’ citizens’ rights is still alive. 2009 is the year of a battlefield to decide whether rights are really a property of ordinary citizens or whether our rights belong to politicians to grant or not to grant.

Those who oppose a simple, plain-English Australian Bill of Rights have their reasons. However, they still assume that human rights belong to authorities who can give or withdraw them. Yet the democratic principles of the rule of law confirm that ‘rights are inherent’ ‘ meaning that they are natural. Your rights adorn the existence of your person since birth.

Australia has signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, so we have a commitment to them. But to opponents of a Bill of Rights, this seems to apply only when politicians want to criticise other countries on their human rights record.

It is in the interest of each person to protect their own personal rights. But one cannot protect one’s rights if they are not specified in a binding document.

One right which needs to be included in a bill is the right to information. An obvious example is Australia’s flawed Freedom of Information rules which in fact allow authorities to withhold information very easily.

But consider also this example:

I have a daughter living in Poland for whom I was paying regular maintenance. The Attorney General’s Department informed me that a court case over there had increased the amount I had to pay.

Now it is a fairly common scam in such cases for solicitors from overseas to inflate the costs and pocket the difference. So I wanted to find out the actual court decision and how much I actually had to pay. Polish regulation prevented me from finding out directly so I asked the Australian Attorney General’s Department for the information, which they had access to. After a five-year battle the department finally revealed the court order but then told me there were penalties because of the delay ‘ and still would not specify how much I had to pay.

I then complained to the Ombudsman on the grounds that I had a right to information about my obligation. The Ombudsman made it clear that there is no such right mentioned anywhere in Australian law: ‘I cannot identify any right which you have to be informed of the outcome of [overseas] court proceedings.’

So in this example only one side of a legal action has the right to information about the judgement and the lack of such a right in Australia has led to a long saga of bizarre treatment by a bureaucracy.

An Australian Bill of Rights is long overdue.

Safwan Zabalawi is a resident of Pyrmont.