Siobhan Hobbs

Effecting global change

Priorities. They are very revealing of who we are. Working for 15 years as a human rights lawyer, women's rights and gender justice advocate all over the world, UNE alumnus Siobhan Hobbs' career trajectory bears powerful testimony to hers.

"My priority, in every role I've had, has been to do all that I can for as long as I can or until I am no longer needed," she says. "The ultimate goal was always to make myself redundant; that would be considered a job really well done."

Having dedicated much of her career so far to addressing the rights of victims and survivors of gender violence, often in countries recovering from war, that job may - sadly - never be completely 'done'. Whether the trafficking of women from North Korea, sexual slavery and forced marriages in Uganda and Mali, or sexual violence as a tool to forcibly deport Rohingya from Myanmar, the human toll of almost every global conflict remains largely under-reported and under-acknowledged. But Siobhan has made it her priority to highlight the injustices.

Especially as a gender advisor to two United Nations commissions of inquiry - in North Korea and Eritrea - Siobhan helped to cast an international spotlight on previously undocumented violence and discrimination against women. In North Korea, working alongside Justice Michael Kirby, she became the first UN Women gender expert seconded to such an inquiry.

"We have difficulty understanding mass violence because it feels so foreign and distant from our own lives, but this kind of work makes you realise it is not so foreign and distant," Siobhan says. "It's happening in real time to real people and not only in war-time but in peace-time, and by states against their own people."

A career in human rights came to Siobhan, quite literally, while teaching English in Japan in the early 2000s, when she became a de facto advocate for trafficked women. The youngest of seven, for whom "everything seemed pretty unfair", Siobhan says she had long before recognised the significant gender inequity that existed in society, but found the experiences of the women "eye-opening".

"I would come home to find women sitting on my doorstep with an array of maladies," she says. "I became someone who could translate for them and help them to navigate the system, and I was only about 19 myself. Some had ended up in debt bondage and were petrified to go to police; they sought my help. That's what triggered me to study law. I was interested in addressing these larger-scale abuses."

After commencing a law degree in Japan, Siobhan travelled to Timor-Leste to work as a youth ambassador for development for a year, and visited Ghana and Mozambique to investigate the treatment of women. Around that time she also transferred to UNE to complete her studies (a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Laws in International Law and Japanese) externally, later switching to on-campus study.

"When I graduated I had the good fortune of becoming a judicial associate with the District Court, which was a great opportunity to see the legal system in operation and reaffirmed my belief that legal practice wasn't for me," Siobhan says. Intent on specialising in women's issues globally, she first worked for the International Centre for Transitional Justice, before the two landmark commissions of inquiry.

"The main aim, for both inquiries, was to inform the international community of the human rights situations in those countries," Siobhan says. "There had been reports of significant human rights abuses for years and years, and the United Nations had become toothless in many ways. For states to intervene, they needed an understanding of what the situation was.

"The things we heard, the documentation and evidence we gathered was outrageous. In North Korea, people were being forced to exercise until they passed out while practising for mass games. People forcibly repatriated to the country after defecting where subjected to invasive searches and violence, and pregnant women forced to have abortions to prevent the birth of ethnically mixed children -and that's not to forget violence in the political prisons and labour camps."

Providing specific gender advice that would go on to inform UN Security Council resolutions  proved ground-breaking. "It felt like a moment in time," Siobhan says. "I loved those roles; they were exhausting and required robust conversations. It was all new and you felt like you were making headway and having things recognised, which is the first step towards any justice or remedy."

Siobhan's contributions to the North Korean inquiry are widely considered to have set the bar for future gender-sensitive investigations, and the use of due diligence principles to report on violations against women in the Eritrean context raised it even higher. Since then, she has acted as a legal advisor to the UN special investigator in South Sudan and worked to support the survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and to prevent violent extremism in Bangladesh (with UN Women). Before returning to Australia to take up the role of director, defence collaboration with the Australian Human Rights Commission, Siobhan also held senior positions in The Hague with Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice.

"There's so much to be done," she says. "Undertaking these roles was an honour and a privilege, and I was dammed to do my best. It was a career path that required a lot of moving and changing of countries, but there is a huge community of really amazing people working in this field who are a huge strength to each other. People not there for the pay cheque, because many are not getting paid, but because they want to help."

Ultimately, Siobhan's body of work powerfully demonstrates how the law can be used as a tool to secure the political will needed to effect change on a large scale. "We are yet to see criminal trials in North Korea, where all the evidence we collected and painstakingly categorised into international law will be used in support of survivors, but hopefully that will happen one day," she says. "It's more about changing the now and preventing it from happening again. It's about calling the government to account and bringing that to the international community's attention, which has other tools and sanctions at its disposal. I have a sense that our work can make a big difference.

“In Kosovo, after 20 years, we were able to get a national administrative reparations program established for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. The research we conducted on the need for reparations and how to make them meaningful, together with the ongoing work of survivors, activists and officials, secured the political will that enabled this. It is the only current functioning administrative reparations program for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in the world.”

Along the way, Siobhan has mastered six languages and developed a much greater understanding of the world, and herself. "I enjoy learning, and learning about new environments, people, cultures and customs- that was a big advantage of the international work," she says. "But being able to use the law and stretch the law and inform the law was exciting, too. When I worked in The Hague I started an international campaign to define sexual violence - there are very few jobs in your life when you see a really big problem and you are in a position to do something about it."