Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the opposition, I am pleased to rise to second this motion. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a remarkable document. It is, in some respects, the product of the 18th century Enlightenment. It comes as a direct descendant of the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and France’s Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789, because it affirms that every human being has inherently certain human rights—rights that are inalienable and inherent in our nature as human beings. They are also rights which are held by humans of whatever kind they may be—whatever race, gender, religion and ethnicity—and wherever they may be in the world. So they are universal human rights—inherent, inalienable and universal.

It is a remarkable document too because it was composed in an extraordinary window of time. It was composed after the end of the Second World War and in the shadow of the horrors of that war and, in particular—as I will come to in a moment—the horrors of the Holocaust itself. But it was also before the Cold War had commenced in all of its intensity and the two sides—communism on the one side and the free world on the other—had lined up into a sort of stalemate. This universal declaration could not have emerged during the Cold War. The competition between the two power blocs of East and West would not have allowed it to emerge.

Its main authors were Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; two professors of law, a Canadian, John Humphrey, and a Frenchman, Rene Cassin; an Orthodox Lebanese philosopher, Charles Malik; and a Chinese philosopher, artist and playwright, Peng-chun Chang. It was an extraordinary collection of men and women, and you can just imagine the scene in Eleanor Roosevelt’s apartment in New York with the philosophical debates between the Orthodox Lebanese philosopher, Charles Malik, and the Chinese philosopher, Peng-chun Chang, about the different philosophical bases for human rights. What is it that gave people human rights? That combination of authors was a remarkable one and, I suppose, speaks of the special nature of that window in time, because, had the debate been going on a few years later, the Chinese philosopher would not have been there. Shortly after the universal declaration was approved by the United Nations, the heavy hand of communism fell over China and it would have been a boiler-suited representative of Chairman Mao who would have been seeking entry—and, of course, denied it because Communist China did not come into the United Nations for many years. But, in any event, Mr Peng was a spokesman for a China that had only a very short time left to be in the world of international affairs.

The declaration, as I said, has a direct line of descent from the 18th century Enlightenment, but it also speaks very directly to the horrors of the Second World War. Article 6, ‘Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law,’ and article 15, ‘Everyone has the right to a nationality,’ and, ‘No-one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality,’ are a direct reaction to the Nazi Nuremberg laws that decreed that anyone but an Aryan was subhuman and therefore to be deprived of their rights as a human being. Article 9, which states, ‘No-one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,’ obviously speaks to the appalling treatment of political opponents, Jews and prisoners of war by both the Nazis and the communists in the Second World War. Article 16, which was a provision that was objected to by some of the nations in the UN at that time, says:

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.

That statement of rights is a direct reaction to the German race laws that prevented Jews from marrying so-called Aryans. The declaration was descended from the 18th century Enlightenment but very much inspired, in that sense, by the horrors of the Second World War. That is recognised in the second paragraph of the preamble, which reads:

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people …

The Prime Minister referred to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a benchmark. That is a common description of this great document. Ten years ago, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described the declaration as ‘the yardstick by which we measure human progress’. As a lantern which we follow through all the travails and challenges of a turbulent world, the best description was perhaps given by Abraham Lincoln in speaking of the Declaration of Independence. This remark of Abraham Lincoln is cited by Mary Glendon in a book about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it bears repeating. Abraham Lincoln wrote that the men who drafted the 1776 declaration:

… did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it, immediately, upon them … They meant simply to declare the right so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.

They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all: constantly looked to, constantly labored for … and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.

Those words are just as applicable to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as they were to the Declaration of Independence.

My friend the member for Flinders reminded me a moment ago that, after the Cambodian election in the post Pol Pot era, the universal declaration was printed up in a little blue book and handed out and taught to schoolchildren everywhere in that traumatised country. It was the yardstick, as Kofi Annan said, by which human progress was to be measured. Nadine Gordimer also described it as:

… the essential document, the touchstone, the creed of humanity that surely sums up all other creeds directing human behaviour …

Sadly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been violated as often as it has been complied with, many would say. Certainly, some of the countries that have cited it and proclaimed it have not been at all consistent in complying with it. There have been horrific breaches of human rights through the world, and breaches are no doubt continuing in places like Darfur, as the Prime Minister described. Of course, there has always been that contradiction in the United Nations. It is worthy to note that, while the Soviet Union and its satellites abstained from the vote approving the declaration, Andrey Vyshinsky, who was Stalin’s prosecutor in the show trials of the 1930s—that horrific example of communist brutality—participated in the discussions, and so he was in the room.

The Prime Minister spoke warmly, as he should, of the role of Herbert Vere Evatt, whose contribution to the foundation of the United Nations is really one of the bright pages in Australian diplomatic history. But I must record my slight disappointment that the Prime Minister did not mention the contribution of another Australian lawyer, whose son is a constituent of mine: Fred Whitlam—Gough Whitlam’s father—who was an Australian government lawyer. It is worth noting that Fred Whitlam, as an Australian public servant, played a very significant role in preparing the UN declaration.

Commitment to human rights is a bipartisan one in Australia, and long may it remain so. On coming to power in 1949, Robert Menzies spoke of the splendid words of the UN Charter’s pledge to peace and human rights. Mr Menzies famously said:

The slogan that ought to be painted round the walls of the General Assembly of the United Nations is ‘We stand for justice.’

In 1950, his government supported words with action. Responding to the appeal by the United Nations for intervention in the Korean conflict, Australia committed ground troops in that war. Three hundred and thirty-nine Australians would die in the UN mandated security action, with more than 1,200 wounded. It was an early and emphatic declaration by the Australian government that the principles of freedom and liberty not only were worth enshrining in the UN Charter and the declaration but also were worth defending.

As I said earlier, for most of the Cold War the UN took a back seat to superpower jostling. It was not until the collapse of the Soviet empire that the UN Security Council could again aspire to its role as the ultimate arbiter of international security disputes and the custodian of global civil rights. We saw that in 1990 with the UN Security Council resolutions to evict Saddam Hussein’s armies from Kuwait, where again Australia contributed to the multinational forces, this time under the Hawke Labor government.

The high water mark of Australia’s support for the enduring principles of the declaration came in the midst of a humanitarian crisis in our own neighbourhood in September 1999. The Howard government’s leadership of the UN mandated security intervention to stop the bloodbath in tiny East Timor distinguished this country’s service in the cause of international human rights. It is a matter for no pride at all that successive governments following 1975 had been queasy onlookers to the domination of East Timor by Indonesia. The Australian intervention, sanctioned by the United Nations, brought to an end the eruption of that dreadful violence that followed the vote for independence by the impoverished people of East Timor. It gave those same people in one of the world’s newest and most vulnerable nation-states a chance at freedom, a chance at popular sovereignty and a chance to exercise the freedom to rule their own lives.

The Australian intervention, led superbly by General Peter Cosgrove, was welcomed by the United Nations as one of the most successful United Nations peacekeeping operations ever, and Prime Minister John Howard would proudly describe our involvement in East Timor’s emergence as a nation as ‘the most positive and noble act by Australia in the area of international relations in the last 20 years’. There could not be a more practical, meaningful demonstration of Australia’s support for those ‘splendid words’, to quote Sir Robert Menzies, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Australia has repeatedly asked for the service and the sacrifice of the brave men and women of our armed forces and our police to help uphold human rights and democratic outcomes in our region and in the world. We ask it of our troops deployed in Afghanistan. We ask it of our forces in the theatre of operations in Iraq. We have asked it of our police, soldiers and senior officials in the Solomon Islands to confront lawlessness and corruption, to put programs in place to produce better governance and better outcomes for the people.

Australia is a proud supporter of the principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We had a hand in its drafting. Of that there can be no doubt. But, more importantly, we have had a hand over many years in upholding those very human and eternal values which it proclaims to the world.

Debate (on motion by Mr Murphy) adjourned.

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