The high commissioner for human rights has pushed back on Scott Morrison’s recent criticism of the United Nations, noting the scrutiny Australia has received is based on international standards it helped create.

In a speech to a human rights conference in Sydney, Michelle Bachelet also urged Australian parliamentarians not to repeal the medevac laws, and to roll back mandatory detention policies.

In a wide-ranging speech on human rights, accountability and activism, Bachelet appeared to address recent speeches and comments by the Australian prime minister calling for sovereign nations to eschew an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy”.

“We can never answer to a higher authority than the people of Australia,” Morrison said last week. “We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community and, worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.”

On Tuesday, Bachelet told the conference Australia had “benefited from a wealth of advice and recommendations from UN human rights mechanisms”, had ratified most core treaties, has been reviewed regularly by human rights bodies and has received at least nine visits since 2008 by UN special rapporteurs.

“Sometimes I hear Australian commentators bemoan all this attention, suggesting the UN human rights machinery should focus its attention elsewhere,” she said. “But this scrutiny is not the function of some international policing system enforcing rules from outside.

“It is based on international standards that Australia has helped to create; which successive Australian governments have voluntarily adopted; and which Australians themselves – people like you – have sought to engage and leverage, in your efforts to make Australia a better, more inclusive and humane place.”

She said that in many ways she thought Australians looked “outwards” to these human rights mechanisms because the country lacked a comprehensive national charter or set of human rights laws of its own.

The “patchwork of laws” which existed needed updating, its gaps filled and its broad exemptions clarified, she said, adding that they also tended to be framed in negative terms – prohibiting particular actions – than positive terms which were proactive.

Bachelet detailed several areas of concern in Australia, including thus far unenforced recommendations to raise the age of criminal responsibility to at least 14 years – it is currently just 10 – and immigration policy.

Bachelet, who was president of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and from 2014 to 2018, told the conference she was pleased to return to the country that gave her refuge as a 23-year-old fleeing the Pinochet regime.

“I recall the solidarity, warmth, and generosity Australians showed me at that time, although I cannot help wonder whether I would experience the same as a refugee today.”

Bachelet noted the “mainstay of Australia’s migration and asylum system”, mandatory detention.

“The people it affects have largely committed no crime; many of them are in very vulnerable situations, and some are children, yet they are subjected to prolonged, indefinite and effectively unreviewable confinement,” she said.

“I know that Australia’s asylum and migration policies have become entrenched over the years by successive governments. But I strongly believe that we are at a point now where it is time to roll back these policies, or at least mitigate their worst effects.”

She urged Australian parliamentarians not to reverse the “small steps of progress that have been made” by repealing the medevac law, which did mitigate the harmful effects of detention.

The law – which allows for a doctor-recommended medical transfer of sick asylum seekers and refugees from offshore centres to Australia – was an example of a practical improvement to Australia’s asylum system to uphold human rights obligations, she said.

“I am concerned that the plans to repeal this law may mean more – and costly – court battles, with lives being put at risk.”

While it pushes to repeal the medevac laws, the government is also seeking to appeal in the high court a federal court ruling relating to dozens of medical transfers of asylum seekers and refugees.

Should the medevac process be closed, the government’s suit appeal to determine the federal court has no jurisdiction to hear legal applications for medical transfers, further shutting down avenues for sick refugees and asylum seekers in PNG and Nauru.