The Asia-Pacific rule of law digest: Advancing Together

June 2019 | Simon Wilkins, General Manager, LexisNexis Australia

simon-wilkinsHello and welcome to the June edition of Advancing Together.

It’s a joy to publish this rule of law digest – it serves as a reminder for us here at LexisNexis to take stock of the great work that we do in fulfilling our guiding mission to advance the rule of law, and also to consider the wider successes and struggles in Asia Pacific on that front.

And, as always, it’s been a busy few months here with numerous rule of law projects on the go.

In the last six months we’ve made great progress in our work with the Fiji Judicial Department and are proud to say that the Laws of Fiji have now become freely available through a website for the people of Fiji for the first time ever. We have been working on this project for almost two years with the Office of the Attorney-General and it was a great achievement to finally announce that it was complete. We were able to digitise over 30 years’ worth of paper legislation (about 30,000 pages) and we are now looking at how we can enhance the current digital versions with more annotations and improvements to the website.

Closer to home, our work with the Australian Human Rights Commission on the Human Rights and Technology Project is continuing. A second whitepaper, co-authored with the World Economic Forum on Artificial Intelligence, Governance and Leadership, was published in early 2019.

This was followed by a symposium, run jointly by UTS, the World Economic Forum and the Australian Human Rights Commission with 65 invited experts and senior decision-makers attending from across government, industry, civil society and academia.

The aim was to discuss some of the issues raised by the paper on leadership, governance and regulation in the context of artificial intelligence, and our Executive Director, Corporate and Emerging Markets, Myfanwy Wallwork, facilitated a workshop on what a potential Responsible Innovation Organisation might look like.

The Australian Human Rights Commission Project Team is currently drafting a Discussion Paper, due to be published early in the second half of 2019. The Discussion Paper will include draft proposals that will then be tested via public consultation activities in the second half of 2019. Further information can be found on the Project subsite, tech.humanrights.gov.au, where you can also sign up for regular updates.

We will continue striving to advance the rule of law around Australia, the Asia Pacific region and indeed the world. The next edition of Advancing Together will be published in December, and in the interim you can follow us on social media (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) to keep in touch with our projects and updates.

We hope you enjoy the read.

Simon Wilkins

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