Melbourne Law School - Theses
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ItemMultireligious Adherence and the Right to Freedom of Religion in India( 2022-10)This thesis examines the scope for constitutional guarantee for the freedom of ‘multireligious adherence’ in India. Multireligious adherence means the adherence to the norms of more than one religion at the same time. This thesis asks whether multireligious adherents and syncretic religious groups are recognised by the Indian Supreme Court, the highest court in India. To answer this question, the thesis analyses the decisions of the Court from 1950 to 2022 on the interpretation of the right to freedom of religion under Articles 25 and 26 of the Indian Constitution. The thesis finds that multireligious adherents and syncretic religious groups are not judicially recognised due to the Court’s implicit assumption that religious adherence is necessarily exclusive. The thesis argues that the extent to which the Indian Supreme Court recognises multireligious adherents and syncretic religious groups significantly influences the right to freedom of religion of both individuals and religious groups in India. Furthermore, the thesis highlights that Article 25 of the Constitution, which protects a person’s right to freely profess, practise, and propagate religion, is an inclusive provision; it does not differentiate between those who adhere to the norms of a religion exclusively and those who do so non-exclusively. Therefore, Article 25 protects even the right to adhere to multiple religions. The thesis concludes that the Court’s ‘exclusivist understanding’ of religious adherence, which fails to consider the possibility of multireligious adherence, conflicts with this interpretation of Article 25 of the Constitution. This thesis aims to contribute to the fields of ‘law and religion’ and constitutional law: first, it offers an ‘inclusive view’ of religion and religious adherence, where adhering to the norms of one religion does not preclude a person from simultaneously adhering to the norms of another; and second, it shows how the judicial understanding of religious adherence influences the constitutional right to freedom of religion in India.
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Item‘Climate Finance’ and the Philippines: Law, Practice, and Meaning( 2023-03)The international legal response emphasizes ‘climate finance’ as the way forward to increase the capacity of countries to deal with the climate change crisis. Under the Paris Agreement, developed countries have promised to take the lead in mobilizing climate finance to support developing countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change. For the Philippines, however, ‘climate finance,’ as experienced, may be different from what has been envisioned. The thesis investigates the Philippine experience of accessing ‘climate finance’ with the aim of learning more about the meaning and practice of the term. The thesis offers a critical account of climate finance in doctrine and practice. Doctrinal scholarship is used to describe and analyse the legal rules relating to ‘climate finance.’ The thesis uses critical analysis to examine the climate change treaties, the decisions of the Conferences of the Parties and the domestic law relating to climate change and ‘climate finance.’ The thesis then examines the Philippine practice of accessing climate finance specifically through the debts it has incurred, particularly in relation to the energy sector, its adaptation response and the promotion of climate bonds. This thesis demonstrates that climate finance has no fixed or defined meaning. Instead, I argue that climate finance is understood through practices borne out of the interaction of nation-states with each other and with institutions, and through such practices, its meaning has become intertwined with debt, the privatization of the energy sector, the promotion of international trade, and the endorsement of private capital. Insufficient scholarly attention has been given to the historical context of colonialism and development and how this influences current trajectories of climate finance. This thesis aims to fill this gap. The thesis interrogates the Philippines’ interactions with institutions through a decolonial lens and pays attention to the colonial legacies that have influenced and have persisted in such interactions. From such examination, the thesis critically redescribes climate finance as part of a narrative of development – the funding that has gone to the nation-state’s mitigation and adaptation responses have carried on an ongoing development project, and the encounter between climate action and development takes place in the context of an enduring coloniality. The thesis makes a novel contribution to international legal scholarship oriented towards the concerns of the Global South. Furthermore, it contributes to scholarship that engages with the interaction between international law and state-based practice, and it does so within the context of ‘climate finance’ and the climate regime.
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ItemAustralian Carbon Credit Units in the Blockchain Environment – Legal Issues in Collateralised Financing Transactions( 2023)The Australian voluntary carbon offset market and its native tradeable commodity, Australian Carbon Credit Units (‘ACCUs’), serve a critical role in the public and private sector’s emissions reduction strategies. This paper is not concerned with this role. Rather, it builds on the distilled view that ACCUs are a type of financial asset capable of being utilised in a variety of ways in the broader economy. After all, participants who engage with ACCUs or emissions units in general are not necessarily concerned with their carbon footprint, but in its value as an alternative investment vehicle. To date, ACCUs are not just traded on the Australian voluntary carbon offset market, but also through blockchain trading platforms, albeit in a tokenised form. This paper focuses on a particular transaction that has the potential for widespread deployment: transactions where lenders extend financing in exchange for a security interest in ACCUs or tokenised ACCUs.
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ItemKnowledge, data, visibility, and power: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities article 31 in refugee contexts( 2023-04)The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (‘CRPD’) article 31, entitled ‘Statistics and data collection’, is commonly used to advocate for and sanction the production and processing of data about the bodies and lives of people with disability. While this practice is common, the legal basis is unclear. This research undertakes a doctrinal interpretation of article 31 and scrutinises disability data production and processing practices in refugee contexts. The research demonstrates that greater attention is required to ensure that disability data practices in refugee contexts adhere to human rights law. Two research lenses are employed to examine article 31’s obligations and implications in refugee contexts: a disability human rights lens and a data and power lens. Congruent with the disability human rights lens, this research argues that the CRPD creates new legal obligations that require the participation of rights-holders in treaty interpretation. Adhering to this new demand on legal research, a Stakeholder Advisory Group of people with disability from refugee backgrounds informs this research’s doctrinal interpretation of article 31 and exploration of the implications in refugee contexts. The second research lens, data and power, provides a critical vantage point for interpreting the article’s text and current disability data practices. This research demonstrates that the growing prominence of disability rights in refugee contexts was followed swiftly by operational guidance recommending the production and processing of data about the bodies and lives of people with disability. While this may have been well-intentioned, nuances necessary for human rights protections were omitted while translating the legal obligations into operational guidelines. One of these protections is the stipulation that data are only produced and processed ‘as appropriate’. Further, this move to quantify the bodies and lives of people with disability in refugee contexts assumes that greater visibility is a path to human rights realisation. An analytical framework developed during this research highlights that strategic anonymity is necessary to attain human rights in some contexts. Strategic anonymity is only achievable through restoring neglected human rights principles that enable individuals to self-identify and groups to self-define. These principles have been elaborated by the CRPD doctrinal contributions to individual autonomy and group rights but continue to be poorly adhered to. This research proposes practical remedies to establish human rights–compliant disability data practices in refugee contexts. The practical remedies include a test for whether it is ‘appropriate’ to produce and process data about the bodies and lives of people with disability in a given context and the inclusion of a non-response option on all surveys, such as ‘I prefer not to say’. Other CRPD-compliant approaches to gaining the information necessary to inform treaty implementation are highlighted, including close consultation and active involvement of people with disability and disability human rights research.
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ItemThe Judicial Concept of Religion in a Comparative Constitutional Context( 2022-12)For centuries, scientists and philosophers have debated what religion is. The debates have also been acknowledged by lawyers, judges and legal academics who are also engaged in a debate about the concept of religion that judges must possess to give effect to free exercise and non-establishment provisions. This thesis considers what concept of religion judges possess. Based on a doctrinal study of the United States, India, the European, this thesis hypothesises that the judicial concept of religion in countries with generalisable free exercise clauses and non-establishment provisions is broad in free exercise cases and narrow in non-establishment cases. Additionally, this thesis seeks to demonstrate that judges narrow their concept of religion in non-establishment cases through a process called judicial inculturation. Judges ‘inculturate’ a symbol by holding it as a part of a particular country's cultural and historical traditions. Accordingly, judges repeatedly hold that symbols and practices from the country's majority religion are cultural and not religion. As such, the judges narrow the concept of religion to exclude the country's majority religion, and accordingly, prohibitions placed on the government by establishment clauses do not operate. Finally, this thesis will demonstrate key limitations to its hypothesis through a study of Australia and the UK. Through a study of Australia, this thesis will demonstrate that judges do not narrow the concept of religion in establishment cases in countries where judges have narrowed the concept of establishment in non-establishment cases. Finally, this thesis will also demonstrate that judges possess a broad concept of religion which emerges from free exercise cases in countries which do not have establishment clauses.
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ItemEmergency Powers in Times of Terror: A Comparative Study of Canada and France( 2022)Constitutions establish the fundamental principles of government, both grounding and limiting the legal exercise of state power. In times of emergency, when public safety is threatened and the state must act to protect its citizens, these two constitutional functions can come into tension. A constitution may provide the legal basis for the state’s response to an emergency, but it may also constrain the state’s ability to act effectively during the time of crisis. Some constitutions, like France’s Constitution du 4 octobre 1958, anticipate this dilemma with emergency provisions. Other constitutional texts, like those of Canada, have no special provisions for emergencies. In either case, the state may choose to provide for an emergency framework by statute, accepting that the law must necessarily be constrained by the overarching constitution. Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, this constitutional dimension of emergency management acquired a new urgency because terrorism places extraordinary pressures on constitutional systems. By its nature, terrorism affects the state in its very essence. Through its immediate effects, terrorism calls into question the state’s ability to provide for the physical security of its citizens and challenges its corollary monopoly on violence. Through its induced effects, terrorism affects constitutional rights through the restrictions that it causes. Two decades after the attacks of 11 September 2001, amidst an ongoing global terror threat, constitutional systems continue to grapple with these pressures. This thesis investigates whether and why constitutional emergency provisions are necessary, or desirable, or even useful for dealing with the threats posed by terrorism. To this end, it seeks insight from the comparison of two constitutional systems that exemplify these opposite approaches: Canada and France.
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ItemConstitutionally protective statutory interpretation( 2022)What does the Australian Constitution have to say about statutory interpretation? Is it irrelevant? Is the only constitutional norm that matters in statutory interpretation that which separates judicial and legislative power? Does the rule of law have any work to do? Might constitutional conceptions of sovereignty influence the way judges interpret statutes? What about federalism? These are the questions with which this thesis is concerned. The answers it gives reveal that the principles and practices of statutory interpretation are informed and constrained by systemic norms of the Australian legal system, the most important of which are traceable to our written Constitution. This thesis develops significantly the presently nascent suggestions that the separation of powers informs the practice of statutory interpretation. It shows a constitutional commitment to the rule of law that has bite, in contrast to the suggestions in more recent ‘pure’ constitutional law cases and commentary that the rule of law has no doctrinal force beyond the extent to which it is inscribed in the constitutional text and structure. Less flatteringly, but no less importantly, this view of Australian constitutional law reveals a number of points at which our constitutional culture remains retarded by its monarchical roots and colonial history. Finally, this thesis’ novel perspective allows us to see that federalism is alive and well in statutory interpretation, albeit that there are aspects of the federal principle that remain underenforced. The original contribution of this thesis is, then, to chart the relationship between the Constitution and the principles and practice of statutory interpretation – two fields of study that have to date rarely overlapped. While the thesis is intended primarily for a domestic audience, it also constitutes the first Australian contribution to the recent trend in international scholarship exploring the realm of ‘quasi-constitutional law’ at the penumbra of written constitutions.
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ItemResiding Permanently in the Midst of the Border: Why Discrimination Law Fails Indefinitely Temporary Migrants and How the Disaggregation of Citizenship can Come to Their Aid( 2022)Over the last decade, Australia has embraced uncapped temporary migration. Commonly, people now spend several years in Australia as temporary residents before qualifying for permanent residence. The focus of this thesis is on a subset of those: the indefinitely temporary, people who have lived here for five years or more but still have no path to permanency. Part A of the thesis explores how immigration law leads to the exclusion of temporary residents and why discrimination laws fail to address that exclusion. Immigration law establishes an internal border that regulates non-citizens via their immigration status. Other government and private sector entities become part of the internal border when they enforce immigration law or adopt immigration status as a means of restricting access to services. Dorsett and McVeigh’s framework of legal categories is adopted to explain how the internal border functions and what occurs when discrimination law encounters immigration law, as in complaints of discrimination based on immigration or citizenship status. Discrimination legislation from Australia and the United States, and constitutional equality jurisprudence from Canada and the United States are analysed. These laws require legislators and decision-makers to ‘imagine’ a community in which discrimination is problematic and where a complainant sits in relation to that community. I conclude that when a state claims a sovereign right to discriminate, a complainant’s immigration status is accepted as an accurate representation of their relationship to the community. Temporary residents are identified as non-members of the political community and discrimination on the basis of their status is seen as unproblematic. However, when state sovereignty is not in issue, temporary residents can be understood as part of an imagined community that is social and/or economic, rather than political. Discrimination law can then limit discrimination based on immigration or citizenship status. Part B of the thesis identifies evolutionary changes that are occurring within citizenship and argues that those changes create an opportunity for law to limit the exclusion of indefinitely temporary migrants. I apply to the Australian context, Cohen’s account of citizenship disaggregating into its constituent elements of legal personhood, social membership, and political membership. I conclude that the legal personhood element has separated from formal citizenship and that Australian law recognises the legal personhood of temporary residents. However, it is unable to form a basis of a claim to non-discrimination. Political membership, consistently with Cohen’s disaggregation model, remains closely aligned to formal citizenship, but temporary residents are constitutionally excluded from it. Social membership is also separating from formal citizenship and is a status that indefinitely temporary residents can hold. I develop a set of markers that indicate that an individual is a social member and explain that the concept is not foreign to Australian law. I argue that social membership at the subnational level can resist the internal border and improve the capacity of discrimination law to address discrimination based on immigration status. Crucially, it can do this without undermining the border controls that are considered fundamental to the sovereignty of nation states.
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ItemThe Political Dimensions of Intimate Partner Violence in Refugee Law( 2022)This thesis concerns refugee decision-making in claims of women fleeing a risk of intimate partner violence (‘IPV’) in their country of origin. Existing scholarship on these claims explains the conceptual challenges decision-makers face, including the ubiquity of IPV and its perpetration by non-state agents within a personal relationship. However, issues with the approach to and determination of these claims have not been resolved: women experiencing IPV are not consistently recognized as refugees within and across jurisdictions. While IPV remains an equally urgent social and legal issue, there has been a general shift away from gender concerns as a topic of deeper and innovative study. There is a notable absence of analysis on the application of the political opinion ground to the IPV context. Indeed, there is no consensus on the desirability and applicability of this ground in the context of such violence, even among scholars who otherwise support its broader use in gender claims. The thesis responds to these gaps in two ways. First, it draws on every publicly available IPV decision in five jurisdictions to provide an up-to-date understanding of IPV decision-making. This analysis reveals that decision-makers fail to define and adequately understand the key concepts of ‘gender’ and ‘intimate partner violence’ and that this failure underpins common and fundamental errors in interpreting and applying the refugee criteria. It also identifies that in these claims, decision-makers routinely fail to draw on typical normative and evidentiary frameworks supporting orthodox refugee status determination, engendering inconsistent outcomes. Second, in relation to political opinion, the thesis analyses the scholarly debate and case law concerning the political opinion ground in IPV claims against the international human rights framework and definitions of ‘political opinion’ in refugee law. It develops, through an exploration of real case examples, guidance for decision-makers on the application of the political opinion ground in this context. The thesis details how an IPV context may give rise to political opinions recognized under both contextual and formalised approaches to the definition of ‘political’ in refugee law. It also addresses the issue of ‘nexus’ to an opinion, which the case law analysis reveals is a previously underappreciated barrier to applying the political opinion ground in IPV claims. Finally, the thesis argues that the identified issues with IPV claims may be overcome by an ‘informed gender-sensitive approach’ to the decision-making process. It is suggested that decision-makers access subject-matter expertise, such as on the causes and dynamics of IPV, to ground gender-sensitive decision-making in this area. This thesis concludes that a renewed focus on the international legal framework and the political opinion ground in this context is crucial to improving adjudication in this area.
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ItemHuman rights for the data society( 2022)In 2011, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon launched the UN Global Pulse, an initiative on digital data technologies. According to Ban, the Global Pulse would ‘bring the work of the United Nations fully into the digital age’. By the end of the decade, in 2020, Ban’s successor Antonio Guterres published the ‘Road map for digital co-operation’, in which Guterres declared that the international community stands at ‘new frontiers of technology and human rights’. The aim of the Road map was to co-ordinate activity across the UN system to address both opportunities and risks that Guterres identified at this frontier. The risks were that digital technologies might be used for ‘surveillance, repression, censorship and online harassment’. The opportunities were for digital technologies to ‘provide new means to advocate, defend and exercise human rights’. This thesis is concerned with the UN’s engagement with digital data technologies in its human rights work in the 2010s. During that decade, the UN has both embraced new technologies and attempted to regulate them. Much of the existing scholarship on the relationship between digital data technologies and human rights in the international sphere has mirrored the UN’s ‘opportunities’ and ‘risks’ framing. The question implicit in this scholarship is how to use human rights goals and norms to make the inevitable datafication of the world better. This sense of inevitability is reflected in the commonly used periodisation of ‘a digital age’, which suggests that there is a singular human world that moves from one technological age to another. In contrast to these approaches, this thesis focuses on how the UN’s work on digital data technologies and human rights might make and shape a particular world. I use ‘world’ in the sense of a normative and imaginative universe in which there is a shared common sense about what it is possible to do, and what ought to be done, and the material environment underpinning that common understanding. My argument is that the UN’s attempts to embrace and respond to digital data technologies are producing a world in which the biggest technology corporations and their data technologies are widely accepted as indispensable to the international human rights project. I call that world the data society. The UN does so through a series of technical projects during the 2010s that produce what one might call ‘datafied’ forms of human rights. In these emerging forms of human rights, core concepts and practices are understood by reference to or performed through digital data technologies. The central implication of this argument is that when human rights practitioners – at the UN and beyond – use datafied forms of human rights, they play a significant role in making the data society possible. By the same token, they also play a significant role in foreclosing alternative possibilities – of worlds in which human rights and digital data technologies might be imagined differently.