QSAN submitted to the independent review of the Queensland Human Rights Act today arguing for the specific recognition and upholding of the human rights of victim-survivors of sexual violence in the criminal justice system.

We raised a range of arguments, including that the current approach in the Act of only specifically recognising the rights of the accused reinforces historical inequities in the criminal justice system for victim survivors, reinforces the invisibility of victim survivors in the system, sends a community message that victim survivor rights don’t matter, is contradictory to other government messaging under the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and the work of the Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce and is unfair.

We also argued for a right to make a standalone human rights claim to a court, including compensation rather than the current approach where a claim must ‘piggyback’ another legal action.

We look forward to the next step in the process of the review.