The above image is taken from the Heartlands Refugee Art Prize exhibition. Click here to see more. By Jessie Taylor and Lizzie O’Shea The UN Refugee Convention gives every human being the right to seek asylum. Those who are found to have a well-founded fear of persecution or a fear of violations of their fundamental […]
By Shae Courtney. This article is part of our July 2013 focus on “Australia in the World”. Click here for more articles in this issue. Since 1948, nations have declared their support for, and recognition of, the inalienable human rights of all under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The recognition of these rights, which […]
At Right Now, we focus on human rights issues that are relevant to Australians. Normally, that means we look at stories in Australia. But in July, we’re broadening our horizons, and looking at Australia’s place in the world. After all, we don’t live in a vacuum, and some of our most pressing human rights concerns […]
By Sonia Nair. It’s been an abysmal week for Australian women with a succession of calculated, ugly and unprecedented expressions of hatred catapulting talk of sexism and misogyny to the forefront of social and political discussion. When Prime Minister Julia Gillard launched the ‘Women for Gillard’ campaign last week and cautioned against abortion again becoming […]
By Sonia Nair. Human rights’ stories centred on child protagonists have become increasingly prevalent, as writers delicately trace the exploitation of their civil liberties and the ensuing acceptance and desensitisation that accompany these atrocities in a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty, deprivation and barbarism. Sudanese writer Majok Tulba did it in Beneath the Darkening Sky with […]
There has been some progress towards achieving due process for Australia’s “legal black hole” refugees.
Armed violence kills more than half a million people each year, small arms being responsible for a great proportion of these deaths. As Stephanie Koorey recently noted in Inside Story, while small arms and other conventional weapons do not cause wars, they do contribute to the “outbreak, intensity and duration of conflict”. As a consequence, […]
By Sonia Nair. “People smugglers are engaged in the world’s most evil trade and they should all rot in jail because they represent the absolute scum of the earth. People smugglers are the vilest form of human life. They trade on the tragedy of others and that’s why they should rot in jail and in […]
By André Dao As we head to the September election, we can be sure that the political rhetoric surrounding asylum seekers will only get worse. Just yesterday, the Liberal Party posted an ad on social media that casually linked boat arrivals with street crime in Western Sydney – despite the fact that of 12,100 asylum seekers released […]
By Sienna Merope Australia’s current mandatory detention policy not only breaches our legal and ethical obligations, it is also a colossal waste of money. Mandatory detention of what the Federal Government likes to call “Irregular Maritime Arrivals” was first introduced in 1989. Under the policy, all asylum seekers who arrive by boat are put in […]
By Jessica Szwarcbord In our second review of human rights in the media we look at Victoria’s new trial plan on how to deal with “aggressive beggars”, asylum seekers arriving in numbers more than double this time last year, and rock art at risk in the face of uranium mining. A new trial by the […]
By Athena Rogers. When the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, millions of Cambodian men, women and children were forced into the countryside where, if they survived starvation, disease and the brutality of the Comrades, they were forced to tend the rice fields day and night. Patricia McCormick’s Never Fall Down recounts the story of […]
