UN Commissioner Rejects Morrison’s Attack on ‘Internationalist Bureaucracy’
Michelle Bachelet says Australia has been scrutinised according to international standards it helped create.
The high commissioner for human rights has pushed back on Scott Morrison’s recent criticism of the United Nations, noting the scrutiny Australia has received is based on international standards it helped create
In a speech to a human rights conference in Sydney, Michelle Bachelet also urged Australian parliamentarians not to repeal the medevac laws, and to roll back mandatory detention policies.
In a wide-ranging speech on human rights, accountability and activism, Bachelet appeared to address recent speeches and comments by the Australian prime minister calling for sovereign nations to eschew an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy”. “We can never answer to a higher authority than the people of Australia,” Morrison said last week. “We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community and, worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” On Tuesday, Bachelet told the conference Australia had “benefited from a wealth of advice and recommendations from UN human rights mechanisms”, had ratified most core treaties, has been reviewed regularly by human rights bodies and has received at least nine visits since 2008 by UN special rapporteurs. “Sometimes I hear Australian commentators bemoan all this attention, suggesting the UN human rights machinery should focus its attention elsewhere,” she said. “But this scrutiny is not the function of some international policing system enforcing rules from outside.