FIGHTING INEQUALITY

Professor Hilary Charlesworth presented the annual Catholic Education Week address in Melbourne in March. Rosie Hoban spoke with her about her strong commitmentto social justice and human rights.

Professor Hilary Charles-worth remembers her father, the esteemed philosopher and bio-ethicist Emeritus Professor Max Charlesworth, sitting calmly listening to a priest deliver a homily in Mass, criticising his public stand against the Vietnam War and support for conscientious objectors. An indignant Hilary squirmed in her seat and urged her father to leave the Mass in protest. He kept his counsel, his dignity and his seat. It was a salutary lesson for the young Hilary. Max modelled for his impressionable daughter a way of speaking the truth with dignity, regardless of the political fallout.

It seems Hilary took the lesson to heart. As Professor and Director of the Centre for International and Public Law at the Australian National University in Canberra she has spoken out more than once on issues of international law and human rights. Last year, she along with an impressive list of legal experts and human rights advocates, published a letter in major daily newspapers opposing the Australian government’s decision to join the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in the invasion of Iraq. The group argued that the invasion was a violation of international law and could constitute a war crime.

In a recent book, titled Refugees, Morality and Public Policy, Hilary questioned the Australian government’s role in East Timor and the introduction of mandatory sentencing in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. She wrote,

‘While the international law of human rights is not perfect in many ways, I want to argue that it provides the best moral basis for public policy that is currently available. The law provides a set or principles and conditions that, if observed, enable people to live lives of full human value and worth. At the end of the day, this is what our society should be committed to.’

Hilary was educated at the University of Melbourne and Harvard Law School, has taught at the universities of Melbourne and Adelaide and has been a visiting professor at Washington & Lee School of Law, Harvard Law School and the Global Law Faculty at New York University.

During a break in studies in 1976 she travelled to India to teach in a boys’ school and saw for the first time the squalor and poverty many people are forced to live in. The inequality of enjoyment of human rights was striking.

Specialising in the international law of human rights has been Hilary’s way of trying to improve the massive inequalities of people in countries like India. Her career path has been a convenient marriage of an academic pursuit and a compassionate heart. Again, Hilary cites her parents as people who modelled compassion and a respect for human rights. The Melbourne-born solicitor and barrister believes a range of people, including the nuns who taught her at Sacre Coeur in Glen Iris in the 1960s and 70s, influenced her career choice.

‘I remember always being struck by how strong and serene the nuns were, and so proud of their religious and intellectual tradition. I was taught by the nuns during the time of Vatican II and there was a great sense of excitement and radical change around then’, Hilary said.

The sense of hope felt by many women in the Catholic Church at that time, including Hilary, evaporated over time. The Church’s attitude to women, she said, is one of the reasons she is no longer ‘a card-carrying’ Catholic. Her disenchantment continues today as she sees leaders of the Church unwilling to engage in discussions on the role of women and the unsatisfying arguments put forward by some Church leaders to justify women’s exclusion from leadership positions in the Church.

‘It really came home to me when I was studying in Boston as a young woman and I walked into Mass one day and saw about 40 priests on the altar celebrating the long life of a priest. I felt quite excluded from this brotherhood.’

Hilary retains a deep interest in the Church. Indeed, her relationship with God has strengthened over the years, to one based more now on love than on anticipated outcomes. She recalls that as a girl her prayer usually involved a plea for something and a reward for good behaviour.

Her changing relationship with God began in 1996 when a serious car accident left her in hospital in traction for several months. It gave her time to reflect and think about what God meant in her life. It also meant challenging the ‘reward for virtue’ relationship and developing a connection based on love and trust.

‘I have never been afraid of God, even as a child. But now I have a sense of the tremendous compassion of God, particularly as I get older and learn more about my faults and failings. It’s like the love of a parent and because I have such wonderfully loving parents I am filled with a sense of comfort in the relationship as I get older’, Hilary said.

Hilary finds the rituals of the Catholic Church comforting in a crisis and occasionally attends Mass at a nearby Carmelite Chapel in Canberra. There, she finds a space for reflection, which is a far cry from the sometimes-frenetic pace of her work.

She applauds the social justice work carried out by the Church, but believes more could be done to champion the human rights of people, particularly asylum seekers. Many Church leaders, such as Frank Brennan SJ and Pat Power, the Bishop of Canberra, have taken a courageous stand against the federal government’s mandatory detention policy, while others have remained silent. Hilary has little respect for silence in the face of injustice; it goes against everything she learned in the heady days of the 1960s.