Australia's sovereignty is being thrown away

We don't need to adopt a bill of rights to overrule our current laws. World rights will take over and be the decider on Human Rights.

The majority of that committee has just signed off on a report that accepts that the definition of human rights that will be used by the planned joint parliamentary committee on human rights will make no reference to domestic sources of human rights. Instead of the Australian Constitution, common law and statute law, the committee will define human rights exclusively by reference to seven international conventions.

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Scalia was highly critical of those who believe it is legitimate to adopt international rulings on human rights. This practice, he believed, was based on what he described with clear contempt as "the ethereal concept of human rights -- capital H, capital R".

"This means all the judges the world over have the responsibility of deciding human rights. It has nothing to do with the people of the society in which they live -- what they wrote into their constitutions."

Read more here.

Thanks to Wand.

Regarding the furore over the "blackface" skit on Australian Television

Having just watched thie Bill O'Reilly show's coverage with the two hysterical women, Gretchen Carlson & Margaret Hoover blowing off about the skit and human rights and respect on this site, and the accumulated rubbish reported about Australia's racism and human rights tardiness, I have one thing to say:

US researchers for these programs, if they use researchers, are incompetent.

Australia is different to America. We've been a lot less restricted and PC with our humour. We've never had anything like the Black and White Minstrel Show (it was imported from the US). To us, if you are not black and need to play a black person you must be blacked up. To me, blackface was the minstrel look, big white lips, and white around the eyes, not completely black. For heaven's sake! If a black person wanted to play a white person would they "white up"? The Wayans brothers did, and dressed as women, for one of their movies.

For crying out loud, we had bare boobs and nakedness on our TVs in the 70s. We even showed married people sleeping in the same double bed (not in the US!).

I didn't think the skit was funny 20 years ago, Red Faces wasn't terribly funny anyway, and it wouldn't have been funny on Wednesday night when it aired again.

With a human rights charter, what's trumps?

When do my state given human rights trump yours?

This time in Canada it’s a cracker of a story about a preacher man who has had 26 wives and more than 106 children. Clearly a sucker for punishment, 52-year-old Winston Blackmore, from the aptly named town of Bountiful in British Columbia, was arrested last Wednesday amid much media hoopla and charged with breaching BC’s criminal prohibition on polygamy.

Not taking a backward step, Blackmore says his fundamentalist Mormon beliefs on polygamy are protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that the charter overrides BC’s criminal code.

More from Janet Albrechtsen.

"Is there now a human right to an airbrushed history?"

It appears so.

Rewriting history has been the order of the day for many years now, we've seen it in Australia with the History Wars' differing versions of history between historical fact and history defined by feelings. (Note the stoush regarding Aboriginal history and the white-man's treatment of Aboriginal people playing out between Manne and Windschuttle. )

Dr Paul Moon has written This Horrid Practice in which he has spoken of pre-colonial cannibalism and, in the same vein as Germs, he has said it was caused by rage and anger, rather than the desire to consume the "mana" or traits of the person consumed. A complainant has taken this issue to the HRC because they claim that the book "describes the whole of Maori society as voilent and dangerous".

The HRC is playing it down for the moment, pointing to a high threshold that needed to be met to avoid unnecessary incursions into the right to freedom of expression. That is all well and good. But one needs to ask why we have allowed such a stifling atmosphere to develop where the immediate response if someone is offended is to clamour to authorities about a breach of human rights. Am I the only one thinking that if we shut these places down, we might just learn to cope with robust debate and return to an atmosphere where free speech is cherished rather than chastened? The ability to run off to some Big Brother bureaucracy is weakening our Western fibre.

Janet Albrechsen has covered the use of Human Rights law to enable revisionism in history in her column this week.

There was once something honourable about human rights. They were limited to the essential rights that most reasonable people can agree on. The right to vote, the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech, the rule of law and so on. But the human rights project started going awry the moment we started drafting up great compendiums purporting to list all the rights of man.