Reform
In January 2011, Mathew Batsiua, Minister for Health, Justice and Sports, addressed the United Nations Human Rights Council within the context of Nauru's Universal Periodic Review. Summarising Nauru's report to the Council, he stated that the country was undergoing legal reforms with an aim to improve guarantees on human rights. He drew the Council's attention, in particular, to the Nauruan constitutional referendum of 2010, which had aimed unsuccessfully to amend the Constitution and expand its Bill of Rights. Batsiua stated: "Had the referendum received the required support, the constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms of the people of Nauru would have been something that all nations of the world might have aspired to. It would have been the first Constitution in the world to protect the rights of disabled persons, and the second in the region, after Papua New Guinea, to provide for the protection of environmental rights. It would have prohibited the death penalty, guaranteed the rights of children, recognised the right to receive education and health. It would have enshrined the right to receive maternity leave, and introduced a right to access information, among other things." In addition, he stated Parliament was considering institutional and legal reforms to create the office of an ombudsman, and review Nauru's criminal code, "much of which remains unchanged since 1899". The decriminalisation of "homosexual activity between consenting adults" was "under active consideration".
Read more about this topic: Nauruan Law
Famous quotes containing the word reform:
“The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone’s sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice.”
—Alison Neilans. “Justice for the Prostitute—Lady Astor’s Bill,” Equal Rights (September 19, 1925)
“We must reform society before we can reform ourselves.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)