Ms Christina Zampas:

As I said in my presentation earlier, of which I think the Senator will have a hard copy, no human rights body has ever found a liberal law to be in violation of a treaty provision. No cases are being brought in this regard, and this is because such bodies recognise that the right to life, the right to health, the right to non-discrimination and the right to be free from torture and other ill-treatment are rights that pregnant women have and that if one takes away the right of a woman to decide, those rights could potentially be implicated. No human rights body has ever criticised a liberal abortion law or asked a country to restrict its abortion-on-request law. That is clear. It is not of late that human rights bodies have not interpreted the right to life to apply to prenatal life; this position goes back to the development of the human rights treaties to begin with, just like with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, CRC. In every case, including the CRC, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ICCPR, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there were attempts to include in the text a right to life from conception or later foetal rights and they were rejected by the states that were in committee and adopted the treaty. There were votes on these matters; they were not just recently decided by all these committees due to their having a certain value base. States decided this.