ABSTRACT
Animal rights activism demonstrates that not all social movements are about human rights. State abuse of human rights has meant that a sizable part of criminology’s historical focus has been on state crimes perpetrated by repressive regimes. Comfort women were subject to systematic sex slavery by the Japanese military during World War 2. The right to protest is essentially an amalgam of the right to free speech, and the right to assemble peacefully in public. The absence in Australia of a federal human rights instrument is largely the result of the fact that the drafters of the Constitution believed the doctrine of representative and responsible government would be sufficient to protect individual rights and freedoms. Numerous developments that have occurred since 9/11 pertaining to the intersection of criminology, human rights and protest involve the regulation and control of protest by police, who are granted power to do so at common law but are increasingly given authority in statutes.
