ABSTRACT In this article we analyse the forced removal of Indigenous children from their kin and country in New South Wales (NSW) as everyday human rights violations. The parallel regimes of child ‘protection’ and criminal laws are discriminatory and function to deny First Nations sovereignty into the future. By incarcerating Indigenous children, the colonial state continuously disrupts families and Elders from passing down culture and law. Targeted removal of Indigenous children is as global as colonialism. While we cannot claim that international human rights regimes have extended everyday enjoyment of rights by First Nations communities, we argue that a global rights-based perspective is conceptually useful for truth telling in curriculum. We reject reductive presentations of incarcerated children as statistics, and of Indigenous people as ‘over-represented’: prisons are not democracies. The rate at which Indigenous children are criminalised and incarcerated is a direct function of decisions and actions by the colonial state. These practices are peoples’ livelihoods, an unfair exchange of futures that forces and keeps generations at the margins. Our purpose is to locate everyday human rights violations in NSW within a broader perspective of international law, colonial history, and unceded sovereignty.

ABSTRACT Contributing to debates in human rights and critical migration and border studies, this article focuses on how certain bordering practices limit displaced people from accessing universally recognised human rights. Specifically, it draws attention to some key bordering practices that restrict the physical mobility of displaced people in Turkey and Mexico. These two countries have become responsible for offering protection to many displaced people while simultaneously containing their mobility towards desired destinations. The analysis draws on extensive policy, program, and scholarly documents, and the testimonials of displaced people in these two regions. We contend that human rights violations are not merely an outcome of protection gaps for non-citizens in the international human rights regime; they can also result from deliberate containment and regulatory practices rooted in historic and contemporary hostile attitudes towards displaced people. We coin these practices ‘bordering human rights’. We further argue that these practices normalise the exclusion of displaced people from avenues of permanent protection in countries that migrants view as having the potential to provide them with safety and access to social services.

ABSTRACT People with innate variations of sex characteristics have long called for legislative protections from harmful practices in medical settings. In Australia, the journey towards enactment of reforms includes elaboration of a shared community platform, national inquiries, and growing support from community, human rights and clinical institutions. The Australian Capital Territory is the first jurisdiction to introduce and pass legislation. While enabling emergency medical treatment and treatments with personal informed consent, it provides for reporting and oversight of contested medical procedures, and criminal sanctions. The legislation promotes a shift towards supported decision-making. It is accompanied by significant investment in psychosocial support that promises to ensure cultural change and improvements to health outcomes.

ABSTRACT In 2023, the United Nations Committee Economic, Social and Cultural Rights will review Australia's compliance with the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). There have been a number of concerning trends in relation to the realisation of economic, social and cultural rights in Australia since Australia's fifth report to the Committee on 1 February 2016: growing economic inequality exacerbated by a cost-of-living crisis, a lack of meeting Closing the Gap targets for Indigenous Australians, a housing crisis and the Australian government's use of unlawful technology against recipients of social security. Far from meeting its obligations under ICESCR, multiple governments have shown a lack of respect for upholding these rights, leaving Australia without the adequate guarantee of economic, social and cultural rights that should be expected in an industrialised, wealthy economy.

ABSTRACT Standardised approaches to disability assessment or social security eligibility are not new. However, experiments in novel algorithmic approaches to assessment are beginning to appear. This article examines a proposed algorithmic assessment—dubbed ‘independent assessments’—under Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (‘NDIS’), which sought to narrow and standardise eligibility criteria for the Scheme. The proposal was ultimately abandoned following sustained public backlash. Yet, disability assessment will continue to face change and contestation, making it timely to consider the abandoned proposal, including through a rights-based lens. The ‘independent assessment’ proposal appeared to violate the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (‘CRPD’) on several fronts, including being overly standardised and impairment focused in ways that were contrary to the social model of disability that strongly influenced the CRPD. The assessment proposal lacked a clear review mechanism to appeal outcomes and relied on a narrow pool of outsourced professionals to undertake the assessment to the exclusion of input by the person’s own support specialists. Inattention to socio-cultural difference also raised concerns, particularly regarding Indigenous people with disabilities. This article concludes by asking what a rights-based disability assessment looks like, while critically examining the limits of a narrow focus on disability assessment methodology.

ABSTRACT Building off fresh empirical research, including 15 interviews, this paper explores the diverse hopes and expectations that local actors articulated for anticipated new modern slavery legislation in New Zealand. It particularly highlights the expectations of three groups—civil society, the business sector and Government—who comprise the key actors driving the modern slavery law discussions forward. What emerges is a complex picture of competing and even conflicting expectations; sometimes made explicit, other times operating beneath the surface. The empirical evidence on the various expectations is then categorised in terms of the rich literature on the functions of law. Five core functions of modern slavery law are identified: the direct, expressive, symbolic, geopolitical and commercial functions. The paper identifies several policy implications of these diverse expectations and concludes with a call for greater clarity over what the law intends to achieve and how effectiveness should be measured.

ABSTRACT In June 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned its decision in Roe v Wade, 410 US 113 (1973), which had established a right to abortion founded on an implied constitutional right to privacy. The decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 US (2022) has sparked fervent debate about women’s reproductive rights and access to healthcare in the United States. This article presents a decisional privacy perspective on Dobbs and considers its implications for privacy rights in Australia. The concept of decisional privacy protects an individual’s ability to make decisions which contribute to defining their identity, free from the unjustifiable interference of other individuals or the state. Drawing on examples of the violation of rights of LGBTQIA+ individuals, I argue that threats to decisional privacy are alive and well in Australia; yet a failure to conceptualise and articulate them as such undermines the value of privacy both to individuals and to society. The Dobbs decision offers a prime opportunity to re-think the meaning and value of privacy in Australian law and society, not only to enrich privacy law scholarship and jurisprudence but also to enable privacy to be more robustly protected as a human right.

ABSTRACT In the global turn to rights, courts are often reified as central actors in processes of social transformation. In this respect, it is worth recalling the clear-eyed and grounded perspective of Andrea Durbach, who emphasised both the potency and limitation of litigation, as well as the diverse functions of courts. This Festschrift essay assesses the transformative power of socio-economic rights litigation. It begins by setting out the different reasons as to why we would expect (or not) judicial intervention on socio-economic rights to engender social change and then distils some central methodological parameters for assessing and undertaking empirical research. This is followed by an overview of the literature with case studies on housing rights litigation in South Africa and education rights in the United States. This reveals significant variance in material and political outcomes for applicant individuals, communities and social movements but points to key determinants of ‘success’—especially the role of social mobilisation, creation of broad-based alliances, and smart remedies.

ABSTRACT Andrew Byrnes’s work has furthered the critical analysis of older persons’ human rights within domestic and global contexts. This article examines his significant contribution to scholarly and advocacy discourse in older persons’ human rights and the impact of that work. By reviewing Byrnes’s work across the last decade, this article locates his contribution within the field. The article observes that Byrnes’s approach provides options to reignite a stalled debate and provides a necessary catalyst for re-conceptualising ageing and human rights towards a convention on the rights of older persons.

ABSTRACT A recurring theme in both Andrew Byrnes and Andrea (Andy) Durbach’s research and activism is the uncertain status of the international human rights system in Australian law, and they have worked in many different capacities to encourage Australian lawmakers to take international standards seriously. Overall, Australia seems to assume that the international human rights system is designed to bring pressure on other countries to improve their protection of human rights, notably those outside the fold of Western democracies, and that the system has little to offer Australia itself. In this paper, guided by the critical insights of Andrew and Andy’s work, I review Australia’s response to the third cycle of the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review in 2021. It provides a case study of the techniques Australia has developed to deflect human rights scrutiny.