[Greens-Media] Greens: Victoria’s Charter of Rights has strong support (Pennicuik, Vic)

[Susan.Quinn at parliament.vic.gov.au]

13 October 2011

Greens: Victoria’s Charter of Rights has strong support

Greens Justice spokesperson Sue Pennicuik MLC today released an 
independent analysis of key submissions to the review of Victoria’s 
Charter of Human Rights and Responsibility (the Charter) by the 
parliamentary Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee (SARC). 

The analysis shows overwhelming support for retaining or strengthening the 
Charter.

"After the closing date for submissions to SARC and before its report was 
released, I decided to commission a summary of 99 selected submissions 
from key organisations to inform myself of the general themes emerging 
from them," Ms Pennicuik said. 

"The paper I am releasing today is a summary of that analysis. It is not 
meant to be a definitive document, but simply an addition to the 
information that is available about the review of the Charter."

The summary of 99 submissions from key community, legal and religious 
organisations and public bodies (approximately one-third of the total 
number of substantive submissions to SARC) released by Ms Pennicuik, found 
that:

74% view the Charter as valuable and support retaining and strengthening 
it;
6% expressed neutral views on the Charter; and 
20% of submissions were unsupportive of the Charter.

"Submissions from the community and legal sectors show how they use the 
Charter in their everyday work," Ms Pennicuik said. "They provided 
numerous examples of the Charter helping them to achieve positive outcomes 
for their clients, such as preventing homelessness." 

"Submissions that were either not supportive or were critical of the 
Charter largely focused on abortion and religious freedom."

"While this summary doesn’t cover every submission made to SARC, it does 
give a flavour of the views of key stakeholders across the board," Ms 
Pennicuik said. 

"Most want to see a strengthened Charter that protects important economic 
and social rights, that enshrines the right to self-determination and that 
provides meaningful legal remedies for breaches of human rights. The 
majority of these 99 submissions to SARC recommended those enhancements."

The summary is available at http://mps.vic.greens.org.au/humanrights.

For further comment: Sue Pennicuik – (03) 9530 8399


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Parliament of Victoria                                                                                                                    . 
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