Jasmine Crittenden and Chloe Lee
In July 2025, a coalition of civil society groups, including the Australian Human Rights Institute, reported to the UN that Australia’s human rights record is lacking in some critical areas. These include Australia’s engagement with First Nations people, people seeking asylum, people with disability and LGBTQIA+ people, and our limited action on climate change.
The report was a submission to the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), scheduled for Australia in 2026. The UPR is an international human rights review conducted by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which countries undergo every five years.
The federal government submits its response along with submissions from other stakeholders, including the Australian Human Rights Commission. These form the basis of a dialogue between Australia and the UNHRC. Australia previously underwent three UPRs, in 2011, 2015 and 2021.
We spoke with Hugh de Kretser (pictured), president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, about Australia’s upcoming UPR.
Why is the UPR process important for Australia?
It’s the most important international human rights review mechanism – a once in a five-year opportunity to take stock of where we've made progress and commit to the things we need to do to improve. Other nations will look at Australia's human rights record, ask questions and make recommendations for actions.
How would you characterise the overall state of human rights in Australia right now?
Australia is a wealthy, stable liberal democracy and, for most people, a wonderful place to live. But that sort of prosperity and security isn't shared equally, and there are many examples of where we're failing on human rights.
Some NGOs have claimed Australia’s human rights record has gone backwards. Is this true?
I think it's a mix. There's no doubt that, in some respects, like racism, we've gone backwards. Since the voice referendum, racism for First Peoples has increased and, due to the impact of the Israel-Hamas war, we’ve seen Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian and Arab communities affected by increased racism. More broadly, anti-migration sentiment has been increasing, including with the anti-migration rallies that targeted certain migrant communities.
What are the three most critical human rights issues in Australia today?
I'll start with the treatment of First Peoples. Closing the Gap is a good initiative, where Australian governments have committed to hold themselves accountable to improvements in health, education, employment, imprisonment, child removal and more. But only four of the 19 targets are on track. Some are making progress, but not fast enough. Some are going backwards. The two worst are over-imprisonment and child removal.
Also front of mind is the treatment of people with disabilities. The Human Rights Commission receives about 3,000 discrimination complaints a year and disability discrimination is just under 50% of those complaints. The Disability Royal Commission handed down its findings. The Australian Government has only accepted a very small number of recommendations, which is disappointing.
But one of the things they have committed to is to improve our national disability anti-discrimination laws. The problem with our federal discrimination laws is that they rely too much on individual people having to complain to address injustice. What we need is a much more proactive approach that prevents discrimination from happening in the first place. You have seen that with the Sex Discrimination Act and the positive duty there. We need that positive duty expanded across the disability, race and age discrimination laws.
What are the three most important recommendations put forward by the AHRC in your submissions to the UPR?
We’re asking nation states that will engage with Australia through the UPR to focus on system-wide recommendations that will improve people’s human rights protections. Three key things we're focused on are: introducing a national Human Rights Act, modernising our national anti-discrimination laws, and a national human rights education action plan.
If you look at comparable countries, we have less understanding of what human rights are, how they work and why they matter to everyone. Civics education standards are going backwards.
Why is the absence of a federal Human Rights Act significant?
In Australia, people don't have the human rights protections they should have. That means we see things like RoboDebt, the Aged Care Royal Commission, the Disability Royal Commission, the Federal Police raids on the ABC newsroom and a journalist’s home, and the criminalisation of Australian citizens who were overseas and attempting to return home during the COVID pandemic.
If we had a Human Rights Act, the rights that Australian governments have promised to protect under international law would be better protected.
The Australian Human Rights Commission has proposed a model for a Human Rights Act. Could you share how this approach would be effective?
The model we've recommended draws on the experience of comparable nations overseas, like New Zealand, the UK and Canada, and jurisdictions in Australia that already have human rights acts – that's the ACT, Victoria and Queensland.
It’s known as the dialogue model. It gives Parliament the final say on human rights issues but makes a strong connection between the role of Parliament, the role of government and the role of the courts. The model says that government, when it's making decisions and delivering services, must properly consider, and act compatibly with, human rights. That’s a legal obligation, and if government doesn't uphold it, people have power to take action. The experience from comparable jurisdictions is that that obligation brings a very strong focus on prevention.
Read more from Hugh de Kretser and the Australian Human Rights Commission’s recommendations for the UPR here.
Jasmine Crittenden and Chloe Lee were Australian Human Rights Institute interns in Term 3, 2025.