On 14 September 2024, the Rights Advocacy Project held our first conference with the theme “Lawyering for Change”. Attendees and organisers all agree that it was an excellent and inspiring day. Everyone left feeling energised and motivated to continue the good fight.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the day – especially our impressive speakers who generously shared their knowledge and experiences with us.

Below are some of our learnings from the speakers.

Keynote speaker.

The day opened with a keynote address from Nasser Mashni. Nasser spoke about the history of the fight for Palestinian liberation. Nasser also shared the challenges of being a public advocate and how he finds the strength to keep going in the face of this adversity.

Some of our favourite learnings from Nasser’s address are:

• 'Lawyering for Change' is perhaps something every lawyer should aspire to from the moment they decide they want to be a lawyer.

• All fights for justice are interconnected – the fight for Palestine relates to every fight for justice.

• The fight for Palestine is a fight for everyone. It's a fight against every sort of hate: settler‑colonialism, patriarchy, racism, antisemitism, homophobia. We are safer from the hate if we fight together.

• Palestine is more than a land. It's a people and a connection to culture.

• When colonisation works well, Indigenous people disappear: food, language, culture. We forget we're on colonised land. We see this across all colonised lands, including “Australia”.

• We also see laws and legal systems weaponised against Indigenous people. There are many examples of this in Palestine. There are over 50 laws discriminating against Palestinians. This impacts Palestinians living in Palestine and around the world for birth until death.

• Throughout Nasser’s time as a public advocate for Palestinian liberation, the mainstream media has targeted him with the aim to demoralise him. The purpose of this public smear campaign was to “chop off the chief’s head” to try and deter others from taking up public advocacy. However, Nasser remained defiant. This empowered others to stand up and join the fight.

Abolitionist Lawyering panel.

Our first panel of the day was about abolitionist lawyering - a discussion about police and prison abolition and how lawyers can work in ways to dismantle racist carceral systems. Our panellists were Maggie Munn, Sarah Schwartz, Joanne Schoenfelder, Karen Fletcher, and Nina Storey. The panel was moderated by Rochelle Francis.

The panel had a rich discussion about police and prison abolition and how we can incorporate this into our work as lawyers and within the community.

Here are some of our key takeaways:

• Any abolition movement needs to be predicated on First Nations justice. We need to look to First Nations communities to learn how harm can be addressed without resorting to carceral thinking.

• To achieve a world without prisons, we need to understand why people are incarcerated in the first place. Then we can properly resource services and people can be provided with support. If we do this, the prison industrial system will abolish itself.

• The issue the prison industrial system is trying to solve is harm we cause to each other. But the system only generates more harm. It decimates communities, it doesn’t address harm.

• We need to decouple responses to harm from the criminal legal system.

• When someone causes harm, we need to bring them into the community – not extradite them. They need to be brought in closer and be provided with the resources to make better choices.

• We need to move away from a conversation about reform of police and prisons. The system is not broken – it is working as intended. It doesn’t need to be fixed, it needs to be broken down and rebuilt with accountability and care.

• We can work using an abolitionist framework with our clients when we work in a way that is more participatory and relational between all parties. We need to be aware of the way we share information and create space to ensure that as lawyers, we understand the experiences of different parts of the community.

• We should develop relationships with our clients and respect their knowledge and expertise.

• Whilst we are stuck in the prison industrial system – we need to be more creative in our lawyering. We cannot change the current systems if we limit our thinking.

• We should consider using administrative law challenges to decision-making by police and prisons, which are often riddled with errors. We should not allow these problematic decisions to go unchallenged. So, brush up on your administrative law knowledge.

• Always apply for bail – this is vital for abolitionist lawyering in this current system.

Mobilising Change in a Conservative and Punitive Refugee Law System.

Our second panel discussed fighting for change in a system that is punitive towards refugees and people seeking asylum and how lawyers can better support communities mobilising change. The panellists were Sanmati Verma, Betia Shakiba, and Ian Seal. The panel was moderated by Isabella Farrell-Hallegraeff.

The panel drew on their varied experiences in the refugee law system and shared inspiring reflections about how lawyers working in this space can mobilise change and respond to oppressive laws.

Some of our top take-aways were:

• The Government’s response to the recent High Court decision of NZYQ shows how quickly we as a community reach for the carceral toolkit. It’s a fact of Australian life that a punitive solution is the “right” solution.

• Once these punitive solutions come to exist, the Government reverse-engineers the justification for the institution. This punitive approach uses harm as a solution.

• There are many challenges for refugees and people seeking asylum in the current system, and there are unique challenges for members of the LGBTQIA+ community navigating this system. The tools and assessment criteria for protection are wrong and they can lead to the exacerbation of harm. People are often required to share inappropriately intimate details about their relationships throughout the process.

• What is missing for many people in the community is social engagement and safe opportunities for people to come together.

• When the sector is faced with punitive or difficult new laws, we all need to stand up as advocates. We should be ready to use everything we have at our disposal – call our contacts in Parliament, mobilise other parts of the sector, and come together to resist these laws.

• We need to know when we need to lead, follow, or work together as advocates. But we should always be as loud as possible.

• Under this current system, refugees and people seeking asylum are made to fit into certain definitions. But these definitions don’t represent people. Our job as lawyers is to put these definitions in service for people.

• As lawyers, we are being trained to think like the State. We always need to be aware of this when we are working with our clients.

 Protest Rights in Victoria.

Our final panel was a discussion about the encroachment on the right to protest in Victoria including the rise in police powers, and how we can protect our right to protest. 

The panellists were David Mejia-Canales, Reham Elzeiny, Adam Chernok, and Sophie L’Estrange. The moderator was Arabella Close.

The panellists shared their knowledge and experiences of recent encroachment of protest rights, including the policing of Land Forces conference protest and discussed how we can continue to protect our right to protest.

Some key ideas shared were:

• Whenever we discuss our right to protest, we need to remember that First Nations people in this country have always offered up a resistance and they continue to resist in this State.

• Our right to protest is the right to be heard on an issue without being threatened by State violence.

• Despite this right, we frequently see violence by the State against protesters and stigmatising narratives around protest and the freedom of expression.

• This includes military policing of protests and also use of social media to track activists.

• We also see encroachment on protest rights by non-State actors, for example, universities’ response to the recent student encampments for Palestine. This included the use of WiFi to track and monitor protesters’ movements.

• There is no legitimate way to regulate protest and still protect the right to protest. Police should not be present at protests.

• Footage of State violence at protests is one of the only things we have to protect our right to protest. It’s one of the only things we have to challenge the police versions of events.

• We can also use Court and legal processes to challenge police, such as in cross-examination of police, if charges are laid.

• We should always be mindful of State and non-State actors’ surveillance of protest. This includes sending undercover police to join activist spaces.

• When dealing with stigmatisation of protest in the community, we can't control the media or our opponents, but we can control how we speak. The words we use matter. We should not fall into the trap of speaking our ourselves and our resistance from the frame of mind of our opponents.

Suggested further reading.

Some further resources recommended by the panellists are:

On Protest in Australia

I McIntyre, How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Protests, Graffiti and Political Mischief Making from Across Australia

C Hamilton, What Do we Want? The Story of Protest in Australia

Visit The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/aboriginal-tent-embassy

How To Survive a Plague: https://g.co/kgs/WvnZKS8

United Nations Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No 37 on the right to peaceful assembly and association: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-37-article-21-right-peaceful

Nina Simone’s Forever Young Gifted and Black: https://g.co/kgs/B9XoNnj

On Protest in Australia in the Context of the Environment

A Krien, Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests

L Robin, Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia

FOE Australia, 30 Years of Creative Resistance

D Hutton & L Connors, A History of the Environment in Australia

T Doyle, Green Power: The Environment Movement in Australia

A Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

On Policing and Aboriginal Rights

Blagg, Crime, Aboriginality and the Decolonisation of Justice;

Russell Marks, Black Livs, White Law;

Veronica Gorrie, Black and Blue

Attwood and Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A documentary history

Bruce Elder, Blood on the Wattle

On Policing and Black Lives

Tom Wicker, A Time to Die

Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prisoner Repression and the Long Attica Revolt

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water

K-Y Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

Angela Davis, Abolition (and numerous other titles, of course)

Michelle alexander, The New Jim Crow

Politico-legal Biographies

William Kunstler, My Life as a Radical Lawyer

J A Farrell, Clarence Darrow

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

A Boe, The Truth Hurts

King, I Have a Dream

Malcolm X, Autobiography

B Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground

Policing and Abolition

Veronica Gorrie, When Cops are Criminals

D Purnell, Becoming Abolitionists

Correia & Wall, Violent Order

Edited collection, Who Do You Serve, Who do You protect?

Camp & Heatherton, Policing the Planet

Correia & Wall, Police

Harsha & Wallia, Border & Rule

M Kaba, We Do this Til We Free US

M Lamnot Hill, We Do this Til We Free Us

M Neocleous, A Critical Theory of Police Power

A Vitale, The End of Policing

Ida Danewid, Resisting Racial Capitalism

David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide