Uni to offer first Mercy Scholarships

New scholarships from an Australian university will foster the worldwide abolition of the death penalty.

The Australian Catholic University's Mercy Scholarships opened on Thursday, five months after a campaign to save Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan from an Indonesian firing squad ended with their deaths.

The university's vice chancellor Greg Craven had floated the idea of scholarships to ensure discussion continued on the death penalty and to commemorate the pair's reform in the years after the Bali Nine drug smuggling arrests.

He wrote that although Indonesia had denied the men mercy, the awards were named after that quality to underline compassion.

"We receive bullets but return scholarships," he wrote.

The university said in a statement on Thursday that it was "committed to the dignity of the human person and that applies equally to all human beings - victims as well as to those who have been convicted of crimes".

Two scholarships will be awarded annually and waive the full tuition fee of the international students' undergraduate courses, on any ACU campus, for up to four years.

To be considered, students must be citizens of a country actively practising capital punishment and submit a written statement on the sanctity of human life.

It came after Foreign Minister Julie Bishop promised to be "unrelenting" in efforts to abolish the death penalty should Australia win its bid for 2018-20 membership of the UN Human Rights Council.

Federal parliament is set to examine how best can Australia work towards this aim with an inquiry, for which public submissions are still being accepted.