14 - Australia and the International Human Rights Regime1

Summary

By any criterion, Australia’s international human rights policy between 1996 and 2000 was fraught with contradiction. On the one hand, the Coalition government reversed decades of myopia by actively supporting self-determination for the people of East Timor, and was commended by the UN Secretary-General as a leading facilitator of the UN’s new regional strategy for enforcing the principle of humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, it adopted a regressive stance towards the traditional emphases of post-1972 Australian human rights policy by rejecting multilateralism, bipartisanship, self-criticism, and the right of UN human rights bodies to monitor Australia’s human rights conditions. Critical to this regressive mood was the government’s inability to become reconciled with the indigenous population and to respond to its demands for a national apology to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children.