 While we're loading, I'll just clarify that I'm not the acting director of the Kaston Centre. I was the acting director of the Kaston Centre while Sarah Joseph was on long service leave, but now I'm just a deputy director as I always am. So, Sarah's back to the acting director ship. Now, you're probably all thinking, oh gosh, this presentation, I'd rather have lunch, but I'd like to tie in a couple of points from the previous papers with mine, which is very different. So John spoke about the impact of protest on policy, and Jessica spoke about the advancement of international norms with respect to gender. And my paper really is about both of these things, as you will see. Now, my non-state actors are a part of international civil society, and you might call them transnational religious actors because they have a very strong link with the Roman Catholic Church. So Monsignor Phillip Riley up there on the right of Brooklyn, New York, is the founder of a group which calls itself the Helpers of God's Precious Infants. And he founded that group in 1989. Now, since that time, particularly with the advent of social media, this group has expanded its transnational reach considerably. So you can see a few examples there of their literature in various countries, including its Europe project, there they are in Brixton in London, as well as South Africa, Canada, and of course the United States. I would like to talk about the conduct of these transnational actors in Australia, and the laws which have been introduced to address this conduct, and its consistency with norms of international human rights law. So in four Australian jurisdictions, we have what are called safe access zone laws. And so safe access zones are sometimes referred to as buffer zones or bubble zones because they create a bubble around a clinic which provides reproductive health services, including abortions. And no anti-abortion protesting can take place within that zone. Now, my home state, Victoria, has a zone of 150 metres, so to do two other jurisdictions with the Australian Capital Territory, leaving it to ministerial discretion with a minimum of 50 metres. And the kind of conduct that is prohibited within those zones varies a little bit from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as do the penalties, which include an option of imprisonment, as you'll see. And I don't have time to go into those details, but that's just a summary there. Okay, so the research that I have conducted has been with my colleague, Dr Ron Lee Sifras, also a Deputy Director of the Cast and Centre for Human Rights Law. And we've conducted interviews with, this slide seems to have transmogrified a bit. Some of the gaps seem to have closed, so apologies for that. So start working in clinics which provide abortion services, having them observe how things have changed, what was the impact of protest and what is the impact of safe access zones, as well as professionals engaged in health policy. So we started off in our home state of Victoria and then moved on to Tasmania. And we're looking at the legal implications from a human rights perspective and also a constitutional perspective. And I'll just mention that constitutionally the laws in two of these jurisdictions have been challenged and as of last week the challenge will be heard, well it was determined that the challenge will be heard by the High Court of Australia native this year. So that's really beyond the scope of this paper but that is going ahead as we always knew it would. Okay, so the protest activity of these transnational non-state actors is depicted in these pictures and these pictures all focus on a clinic in the state of Victoria, in a Melbourne. Okay, so there on the top right you can see a number of protesters and we have protesters that oppose the clinic, these helpers of God's precious infants, as well as counter protesters which according to staff working there would result in a circus. They couldn't do their job, they felt so unprofessional, unable to do their job because of the climate that was going on outside. Now the lower one there on the right we have some paraphernalia that was handed out by the helpers of God's precious infant. So typically they will approach people, walk alongside them, sometimes chase them and hand out brochures and sometimes some pressed plastic fetuses into their hands. Now the brochures were said to contain frightening misinformation that abortion would cause infertility, breast cancer, relationship breakdown, mental illness, particularly depression. So that's an image of that. Now the images on the left, the two top ones and the bottom one, images taken from the Rosary Parade, which happened every month after a mass which was conducted at St Patrick's Cathedral, the flagship church of the Roman Catholic faith in Victoria. So after this mass the whole congregation would proceed to the clinic and congregate outside during its operating hours and so you can see some images there of the geographic posters and the number of people. The final image there of police taken from the Guardian was taken in 2001 and that was after a murder occurred at the clinic. A protester, a man who had stood with the protesters a couple of times, but the protesters claimed was not one of their number subsequently for obvious reasons, entered the clinic and murdered a security guard. His intention was to murder everyone inside that clinic, so 44 people at the time and he had sufficient ammunition to carry out his plan. He had numerous firearms, explosives, door jams and other material. So that brings I think into sharp focus the connection between acts of violence and this form of protest. So we heard from staff that they never felt safe when the protesters were there. There was a sense of stress and distress and constant fear of confrontation. Some protesters were indeed much quieter and did, they were just confrontational in their approach to patient staff and others, other passers-by, assumed to be patients or staff, but some were extremely confrontational and would actively try to impede access to clinic premises, stop people from getting out of cars and sometimes get into physical altercations so police would have to be called. So the impact of protest was profound for some staff and also for patients. Now in the process of getting ethics approval we decided to just interview professionals, so staff working in clinics and professionals engaged in policy. So we didn't interview women, which we thought would be difficult and we didn't interview the protesters because we thought that we wouldn't gain the trust of the staff that we wanted to interview. So their observations about the impact of the protest was that it was devastating for a lot of women. There were some days when everyone coming in for this legal health service was crying, patients felt unsafe and it was especially damaging for young women, teenagers or those with vulnerabilities, mental health problems, a history of abuse. And it also had a palpable impact on access to services, particularly in regional areas. So in regional areas a lot of doctors were simply not prepared to provide the service because within a small community people were known to others and protesters would target medical professionals. So one nurse practitioner in a large regional hospital said my biggest fear was that they were going to send up a plant, a fake client and the plant would come and see me on a Monday morning and something would happen or they would expose me or target where I live or target the kids because they've done that with other doctors. So her question was will there be any physical harm out of this? Are they going to target my car when I come to work? And these protesters in this particular area would target staff members' houses with red paint or pigs blood and they had the delightful habit of carrying pigs organs around their necks, pigs uteruses apparently. So that's a snapshot of the impact of this form of protest. Okay, so in terms of the consistency with safe access zone legislation seeking to address this kind of conduct and human rights there's a lot that could be said and I don't have time so I've just set up a little set of scales illustrating some of the points. Safe access zones do undermine the rights of these non-state actors. They limit their right to express and manifest their religious views. They limit to some extent their right to free speech. Okay, now my paper argues that those limitations are unnecessary and proportionate to meet the legitimate aims of one the rights of others and I'll mention them in brief but also public safety, public health and well-being and public order to some extent. Okay, all of those aims. But in terms of the rights of others, the right to health, right to equality of access to health services, the right to privacy was a big one obviously and it was observed that women didn't feel that they were in a position to challenge these intrusions because of the nature of the health service that they were accessing, the stigma, the shame around it. The right to equality and non-discrimination security person, freedom from cruel and human degrading treatment arguably and protection from gender-based violence is the big one that I'm going to talk about. So the laws providing for safe access zones okay, I'll be very quick, are consistent with the state's due diligence obligations to address, to diagonally address the conduct of non-state actors. And I mean one reason is all of these norms but the other is particularly because of this, the crystallization of this norm which is the prohibition on violence against women which is the last point that I really want to make. So this is a norm, the creation of which engages non-state actors. So non-state actors have been involved in, for example, the world conferences on women like the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women and the articulation of the Beijing declaration and platform for action. So they were there, they were terribly involved and while reproductive rights have been continually contested and contentious and difficult to advance, the push for the recognition of the prohibition on violence against women as a norm of international law has followed a very different trajectory. So from 1989 when the committee, the CEDAW committee, the committee which supervises the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women mentioned violence against women and said well, prohibiting violence against women is part of state's performance of their obligation under this treaty and it was very tentative and it was very terse and then three years later there was another general recommendation and then in July last year drawing on a whole lot of state practice, jurisprudence, the committee concludes that this prohibition has evolved into a principle of customary international law and we don't just see this in relation to human rights law, we see this in relation to international criminal law, we think about the ICTR, the ICTY, particularly the Akayesu hearing with respect to genocidal rape. So gender-based violence against women is defined by the CEDAW committee as violence which is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately and therefore violates their rights and it can take multiple forms including harassment, coercion or acts intended or likely to result in psychological rather harm and my closing argument is that this kind of conduct directed at women falls within the scope of violence against women and here are just some quotes from my interviewees making that point. There were a lot of analogies drawn between this kind of conduct and racial vilification and how that is quite well addressed. Well it's addressed under international law and under Australia's domestic law implementing its obligations whereas this kind of vilification of women has been tolerated for years and years. So it's really interesting to reflect upon the role of non-state actors in the crystallization of the norm of the prohibition on violence against women and it's relevant to this area and I'll just close with a quote from the Director of Women's Health Victoria who is a professional working in women's health and was a prime mover in pushing the Victorian legislation through and she said it probably wasn't until the government started recognising issues associated with violence against women that we were really able to table this as not just women getting access to abortion or contraception services because they're protesting that too as they do but it was actually a public situation where we were turning a blind eye to violence against women who were trying to access a legal health service. So we kept it away from the abortion debate, it was a debate about women's right to access a health service without being harassed and violated. Okay I think I'll need to leave it there. Thank you very much.