The National Association of Community Legal Centres (NACLC) is an association of around 200 community legal centres which aims to assist and promote them, and provides a forum for the development of community legal centres’ policy. For more information, visit their website: http://www.naclc.org.au/
Patrons
Hilary Charlesworth
BA LLB (Melb.), SJD (Harv), Barrister & Solicitor, Vic
A patron of the Women’s Legal Centre, Professor Hilary Charlesworth is a distinguished scholar and promoter of human rights in both Australian and International contexts.
She has worked with various non-governmental human rights organisations on ways to implement international human rights standards and was chair of the ACT Government's inquiry into an ACT bill of rights, which culminated in the adoption of the ACT Human Rights Act 2004. She is also a patron of the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture.
She is currently Director of the School of Regulation, Justice and Diplomacy in the College of Asia and the Pacific and Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice at the ANU. She also holds an appointment as Professor of International Law and Human Rights in the ANU College of Law and has recently been appointed to the Australian National Group of the Permanent Court of Arbitration by the Australian Government.
She has held visiting appointments at Washington & Lee School of
Law, as Manley O. Hudson Visiting Professor of International Law at
Harvard Law School, New York University Global Law School as Wayne Morse
Professor at the University of Oregon, and at Université de Paris
(Paris I). She was also the 2005 Sir Ninian Stephen Fellow at the
Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law at the Law Faculty, University of
Melbourne. She was winner (with Christine Chinkin) of the Goler T.
Butcher Medal awarded by the American Society of International Law in
2006 for "Outstanding contributions to the development of international
human rights law."
Elizabeth Evatt AC
A patron of the ACT Women’s Legal Centre since its inception in 1996, Elizabeth Evatt is a distinguished jurist in Australian and international legal institutions.
In the creation of the Family Court of Australia under that same Act in 1975, Evatt was appointed its inaugural Chief Judge. In 1973, Justice Evatt was Deputy President of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. In 1974, she headed the Royal Commission on Human Relationships and in 1984 she was elected as a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
In 1982 Elizabeth Evatt was made an Officer of the Order of Australia, and in 1995 she was granted Australia’s highest civil honour and made a Companion of the Order of Australia.
In 1995 Elizabeth Evatt was commissioned by the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs to review the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984. Her extensive report, Review of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 ('the Evatt Review') was presented to the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs in 1996 and paved the way for legislative reform to a complex and controversial area of law.