On 1 July 2023 All Means All made a submission to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights Inquiry into Australia’s Human Rights Framework.
Our Submission considered primarily the importance of ensuring that Australia’s human rights framework is effective to adequately protect the fundamental human right to education through the enactment of a national Human Rights Act that includes a provision in relation to the right to education that expressly recognises and incorporates each of the following:
- the right to education in its general application, as guaranteed by Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights;
- the right to education as it applies to the situation of people with disability, being the right to inclusive education guaranteed by Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disability and explained by the Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities in its 2016 General Comment No.4;
- the right to culturally and linguistically appropriate education for minority groups, which rights are recognised under a range of international human rights instruments such as the Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; and
- intersectionality, being the experience by some Australians of multiple social categorisation or attributes, such as age, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, intersex status and ethnic origin or race, that may lead to multi-layered and cumulative discrimination or disadvantage and materially impact on their human right to education.
You can read our Submission in full here. Please contact us if you require access to another format.
Image © Jon Tyson
ALT: A photograph of a wall and ceiling in a dark room. On the wall there is a neon sign with the single word “all”.