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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 3452 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

It is appropriate that we celebrate the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was a significant milestone in the development of an ordered and peaceful world. It is 50 years. It was a significant achievement at the time. It has achieved a lot along the way but, of course, there is an awful lot left to be achieved, as Amnesty International indicates in its report. As the Chief Minister and Mr Stefaniak have mentioned, the length of the road yet to travel is sobering.

Amnesty International indicates that half of the world's countries gaol people because of their beliefs, race, ethnic origin, sex or religion, and a third of the world's governments torture their prisoners. Governments fail to enforce the principles of the declaration or frequently make laws that ignore human rights standards. Individual defenders of human rights and human rights organisations are sometimes the only ones to speak against human rights violations and campaign to ensure fundamental rights are respected. The truth of that cannot be gainsaid. It is something that assails us every day as we read the newspapers. There is enormous abuse of human rights throughout the world. There is for us nationally, sadly, still a range of areas in which the national and State and Territorial governments in Australia do not fully meet their obligations to respect absolutely the human rights of all Australian citizens.

The international situation is, I think, still quite extreme. As we face the next millennium we face other than the dawning of a new golden age. We face a new century which, in the context of today's news and the situation in countries around the world, will be ushered in by extreme hunger, extreme poverty, extreme intolerance and violence on scales perhaps as great now as they have been since the Second World War when the Universal Declaration was entered into, the catalyst being the devastation of the Second World War. These are the situations that the world is facing. Situations at the bottom end signify the extent to which human rights throughout the world are ignored on an enormous scale.

I noticed an article in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald from Sir Zelman Cowen. Sir Zelman wrote:

There are now more people fleeing persecution, war, human rights violations and other events than at any time since World War II. Amnesty International estimates that there are some 15 million international refugees, as well as an estimated 25 million people who have been displaced within their own countries.

Sir Zelman commented on the fact that the financial crisis in our own region has plunged over 400 million people into severe financial crisis. The immediate repercussions of this include things such as acute food shortage, extreme unemployment and a severe shortage of medical supplies. I think that, most touchingly, is evident in the significant problems faced by people in Africa and to a lesser but grave extent in Asia in relation to the prevalence of AIDS and HIV. The lack of basic support for the 30 million or so Africans infected with the HIV virus at its most immediate level indicates the extent to which the basic human rights of people throughout the world have been neglected. That is what we are talking about here. The lack of medical support to those people is a lack of respect for the human rights of those people.

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