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About the Project
With the internationalisation of many issues impacting on the lives of Australians, from trade law to indigenous issues, environmental protection, refugee policies, terrorist threats and regional and international security, the relationship between international law and domestic law is emerging as a matter of increasing significance.
However, the structure of Australia’s domestic legal system, developed at the beginning of the last century, has not responded to the more recent expansion of the international legal order over the last fifty years. Australia’s domestic system displays a level of anxiety in its attitude towards international law, with the three arms of the Australian government regularly exhibiting inconsistencies in their approaches to international legal issues, both between each other and within themselves. These inconsistencies have not been addressed, either by government or by legal commentators, in any systematic way.
Over the next three years, the Project will engage in normative and empirical research about the interaction between domestic and international law in Australia. Through a series of publications, conferences and a comprehensive review of primary and secondary resources, the Project seeks to examine the tensions underlying Australia’s relationship with international law, and aims to gauge the adequacy of the present domestic legal structures to meet the global challenges now facing Australia.
The Project is a partnership between personnel at the Centre for International and Public Law at the Australian National University and the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at the University of New South Wales. It is funded by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council.
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Diary extracts:
Australia's relationship with international law
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