Principal speaker
Professor Megan Davis
Professor Megan Davis will give the 2017 Michael Whincop Memorial Lecture titled: The United Nations, Indigenous Peoples and Australia: Why Australia is an international outlier on Indigenous Peoples rights.
Internationally Australia is a high income country; affluent, peaceful with a strong and effective rule of law. However, on the situation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and the recognition of Indigenous Peoples' rights, Australia is an outlier among comparative western liberal democratic states. Australia lags behind both developed and developing countries on structural accommodation as well.
One of the reasons for this is the failure to acknowledge and address the original grievance: the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples and the lack of recognition of pre-existing property rights and the authority structures of Aboriginal people.
This lecture will analyse the paucity of Indigenous rights in Australia and how international norms and comparative Indigenous constitutional rights informed the historic constitutional dialogues and the Uluru national constitutional convention outcome on 26 May 2017.
About the speaker
Professor Megan Davis is the newly appointed and first Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous at the University of New South Wales and the Chair and United Nations expert member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples and holds portfolios in the Forum that include Gender and Women an Administration of Justice.
Professor Davis researchers in public law and public international law. Her current research focus is on constitutional design, democractic theory and Indigenous Peoples.
About the lecture
The Michael Whincop Memorial Lecture was inagurated in 2004 to honour the contributions of the late Professor Michael Whincop to legal scholarship. This lecture series aims to celebrate Michael's commitment to research excellence and innovation at Griffith University.
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RSVP
RSVP on or before Tuesday 15 August 2017 , by email lawfutures@griffith.edu.au