Kirby Michael

Australian High Court Judge, perhaps the best known in his country, a high profile human rights activist and law reformer, publicly gay since 1998. Michael Kirby was appointed one of the seven Justices of the High Court of Australia, the nations Federal Supreme Court, by the Keating government in February 1996. He is an internationally recognized advocate of human rights and long-standing critic of discrimination on the grounds of HIV status, race, gender or sexual orientation. Born to a mother from Ulster, Kirby was raised in working-class Concord in inner Sydney, with a Methodist upbringing. A star pupil and brilliant scholar, he holds BA, LLM, and BEc degrees, and several honorary degrees and fellowships. He has served as a Deputy Chancellor and as Chancellor respectively of Newcastle and Macquarie universities. He practiced as a solicitor and then as a barrister before his appointment in December 1974 as a Deputy President of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. As a young solicitor during the early days of Civil Liberties, he helped defend the publisher of extracts from the erotic book, "Fanny Hill," and offered his legal services free of charge to the C.A.M.P. gay group at Sydney University. As the youngest person appointed to Federal judicial office in Australia, he held that position until 1983 when he was appointed a Judge of the Federal Court of Australia. In 1984 he was appointed President of the New South Wales Court of Appeal and then to the High Court bench in 1996. Kirby was foundation Chairman of the Australian Law Reform Commission,1975-84, while also serving on numerous national bodies including the Administrative Review Council, the Australian Council of Multicultural Affairs and the Executive of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). The international posts he has held include chairperson of two Committees of the OECD on Privacy and Data Security. He has taken active roles in UNESCO, the Global Commission on AIDS of the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), serving as a Commissioner of the latter from 1984, and as its elected President since 1995. For the ILO he was part of a mission to South Africa in 1992-93 to examine that countrys labor laws. From November 1993 to April 1996, he was Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations on Human Rights for Cambodia. In February 1994 he was the Independent Chairman of the Constitutional Conference of Malawi. In March 1994, Kirby was appointed by the Director-General of UNESCO to be a member of the International Jury for the UNESCO prize for the teaching of human rights. In 1995 he was appointed to the Ethical, Legal and Social Issues Committee of the Human Genome Organization now based in London: monitoring the largest cooperative scientific project in history. In 1995 he was also appointed to the Editorial Committee of the Commonwealth of Association for Education in Journalism and Communication and 1996 saw his appointment to the International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO, Paris, and to the International Council for Conflict Prevention of International Alert, London. In 1997 he took part in the preparation of a Judicial Training Manual on Human Rights being prepared by the UN Center for Human Rights. While it was well-known in legal and social circles that the distinguished Kirby had lived with a male companio Read less