1. Human Rights Development of Human Rights – Part 2 Workers Rights
Mr Scully
HSC Legal Studies

2. Outcomes for this Lesson -
Conduct a Case Study on the impact of the suffrage movement in the development of Human Rights.

3. Introduction
The theory of democracy, that the authority of government should be based on the will of the people as expressed through genuine periodic elections, is not a new concept; it can be traced back to ancient times. However, even where democracies have existed throughout history, the right to vote, known as suffrage, was usually restricted – for example, by status, gender, race, age, beliefs or nationality. The concept of universal suffrage is only a recent development in the world, but where it has been achieved, it is now considered an essential human right.

4. Suffrage
The first modern countries to achieve democracy allowed only a limited number of men to vote, usually only those men with higher status – those who owned large amounts of property or came from certain backgrounds. This was usually due to a mistrust or suspicion of the general population, or an assumption that they could not understand the affairs of government.
Demands for suffrage for all males began in world democracies in the 19th century. For example, in the United Kingdom, rights for male voters were only gradually extended – to males who rented land of a certain value (1832), to all male householders (1867), and to males in the countryside (1884). However, this still represented only about 60 per cent of the adult male population.

5. Among democratic countries, pressure grew to extend voting rights to women. Women who campaigned for the right to vote were known as suffragettes. They waged a long and difficult campaign for the right to vote in democracies dominated by male interests.
The right to vote regardless of gender was an important symbol of the struggle of women for equality in general. In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women an equal right to vote. The Australian state of South Australia followed in 1894, with the Australian Commonwealth granting women’s suffrage in It was not until 1918, after the end of World War I, that the United Kingdom gave women a limited right to vote; this was not made equal with men’s rights until The United States passed the Nineteenth Amendment, allowing women to vote, in 1920.

6. Other Campaigns
Apart from status and gender, race was another issue that conflicted with rights to vote. For example, in the Americas, social stigma was strongly attached to certain races, particularly native Americans and the African-American populations. In 1870 in the United States, following the American Civil War, the right to vote was extended by the Fifteenth Amendment to all adult males, regardless of race, colour or previous servitude.

7. In Australia, Indigenous peoples had the right to vote since the time of Federation in 1901, if their state of residence granted them that right, and some South Australian Aboriginal men and women voted for the first Commonwealth Parliament. However, due to later interpretations by the government and discriminatory measures adopted by the states, Indigenous peoples were effectively denied the right to vote until 1962.
In that year, the Commonwealth legislated to ensure that Indigenous peoples had the right to vote regardless of their state voting rights, although unlike other Australians, voting was not compulsory for them. A 1967 constitutional referendum finally gave Indigenous Australians the right to be counted in the Australian Census. The constitutional amendment became a symbol of public recognition of the rights of Indigenous Australians.

8. Various images from free and restrictive societies.

9. Universal Right
The right to vote was recognised as a universal human right in Article 21 of the UDHR. By 2011, 87 countries, representing 45 per cent of the world’s total population, were classified as democratic. However, 48 countries, representing 24 per cent of the world’s population, were still classified as ‘not free’. The remaining 60 countries were ‘partly free’. In 2012, revolts against dictatorial regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, in what has become known as the ‘Arab Spring’, may see a further increase in the number of ‘free’ countries.