'A Private Life' is available from all good bookshops from
28 September 2011 or from www.allenandunwin.com
NEW
For Chinese readers, I have attached a translation of a chapter
of my book ‘’A Private Life’’ concerning my partner Johan. This will give
them an insight into me and my life. And the importance of love to every human
being.
Welcome to my home page. This allows me to speak directly to you. Until now, I have mainly had to speak through the forbidding pages of court reports and formal legal texts. Of course this has not stopped me in the past from speaking directly. Basically, I always try to write in the same way as I speak.
My career has included work as a judge in two great Australian appellate courts - the High Court of Australia and the Court of Appeal of New South Wales. This website helps you to find:
My judicial opinions in the courts on which I have served;
My speeches, articles, book reviews and other 'pearls of wisdom';
For the first time, this website has my speeches back to 1975, the year I helped set up the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC). Virtually all of the speeches are here. In fact, I lay claim to inventing the 'blog'. Follow my speeches and you can track my activities, experiences, thinking and feelings over 34 years of public life in Australia and abroad;
My multimedia gallery provides photos and films of my work and home life;
The website will offer filmed and recorded excerpts from speeches old and new as well as podcasts that can be downloaded.
Everyone who visits this space has a right to agree or disagree with what they find. Causing occasional offence is not the greatest sin. Being boring, self-righteous or unkind compete for that award. I welcome feedback and suggestions as I embrace new adventures in my life. These may take me into arbitration and mediation; academic teaching and research; new international activities; and work completely outside the "Great Game" of the law.
Hon Michael Kirby's UN Appointment
Foreign
Minister Bob Carr today welcomed the appointment of the Hon Michael
Kirby AC CMG as chair of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) Commission of
Inquiry to investigate human rights violations in the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), announced in Geneva.
Senator
Carr congratulated Mr Kirby and expressed hope the inquiry will provide
definitive information on the nature of human rights abuses in North
Korea.
“The
Honourable Michael Kirby’s strong legal credentials and previous
experience in the UN system make him an ideal candidate for the
position,” Senator Carr said.
“Australia
is deeply concerned by the human rights situation in the DPRK and I’m
pleased that Australia co-sponsored and supported the UN resolution
which established the Commission of Inquiry.
“It
is time the North Korean government acted to address human rights and
there should be no doubt about Australia’s ongoing support of mechanisms
to ensure action is taken.”
The Commission of Inquiry (COI) was established by a resolution of the UN HRC on 14 March 2013.
The
COI’s mandate is to investigate human rights violations in the DPRK,
including the right to food, violations associated with prison camps,
torture and inhuman treatment, arbitrary detention, violations of the
right to life, freedom of movement and enforced disappearances,
discrimination and violations of freedom of expression.
The COI will operate for a period of one year and is expected to be operational by June.
In
addition to the Hon Michael Kirby as Chair, the other members of the
COI are Marzuki Darusman, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of
human rights in the DPRK and former Indonesian Attorney-General, and
Serbian human rights campaigner Sonja Biserko.
Michael Kirby Named Patron of Kirby Institute at UNSW
The Hon. Michael Kirby has been named Patron
of the Kirby Institute. The Institute is the new name of the cutting
edge centre for scientific and social research into HIV, viral hepatitis
and sexually transmissible infections. It is based in the University of
New South Wales. Since 1988, Michael Kirby has had a close association
with the global
and national HIV response, including through the World Health
Organisation, United Nations Development Programme, UNAIDS and the
Commonwealth of Nations. The Kirby Institute was named in December 2012
as a major recipient of research funding awarded by the National Health
and Medical Research Council. Professor David Cooper, Director of the
Kirby Institute, received a
grant of $12.6 million for a major research program involving 7 groups
in Sydney and Melbourne investigating how HIV lies dormant in some parts
of the body, evading eradication by HIV therapy. The research will
examine how the immune system responds to the virus. For further
stories CLICK here.
Attorney-General, The Hon Robert McClelland MP; President of the Australian Bar Association, Mr Thomas Bathurst, QC; President of the Law Council of Australia, Mr John Corcoran; President of my home Bar, the Bar Association of New South Wales, Ms Anna Katzmann SC;The Hon T E F Hughes, AO, QC; Judicial, Academic and other Colleagues; Family and Friends:
In this room, where independent judges uphold the law and the Constitution, I start by honouring the people of Australia, in all of their diversity, most of them happily unaware of what we do here today. Fortunate is a land that lives in confidence under the rule of law, with elected parliaments, uncorrupted officials and independent judges.
Australian Jurist Michael Kirby Named Co-Winner of Gruber Justice Prize
NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY
Michael Kirby, retired judge of the High Court of Australia, was today
named as the co-winner of the Gruber Justice Prize for 2010. The
announcement was made in New York by the Gruber Foundation, a
philanthropic organisation that awards the Gruber Prizes annually.
Michael Kirby is the first Australian to win the Gruber Justice Prize,
although other Australians have previously been named as winners of
Gruber Prizes in the field of science. These have included Professor
Elizabeth Blackburn who won the Gruber Prize for Genetics in 2006 and
who was named in 2009 as co-winner of the Nobel Prize for
Psychology/Medicine for her discovery of telemerase. Professor
Blackburn is one of a number of Gruber Prize winners who have later gone
on to be awarded the Nobel Prize. There is no Nobel Prize for Law or
Justice.
