DATE: 13 MAY 2011 Amnesty International has criticized Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers and indigenous issues in its 2011 World Report, which has been released today. The chapter on Australia highlights the Federal government’s refugee policy and its impact on asylum seekers with mandatory, long term detention and poor conditions in detention facilities putting a large […]
DATE: 11 May 2011 The Gillard Government has announced additional funding to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) as part of the 2011-12 Budget. The total funding of $5.7 million will include the establishment of an Age Discrimination Commissioner and support team as well as $1.6 million over four years to restore the positions of […]
DATE: 6 MAY 2011 Yesterday, the Victorian Government introduced amendments to the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 in parliament. These changes reduce the ability of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission to “respond effectively to systematic discrimination.” The amendments maintain the Commission’s key functions on identifying and addressing discrimination including through education and dispute […]
DATE: 5 May 2011 Recent privacy breaches at Sony and Dell Australia highlight concerns about Australia’s privacy framework and its ability to protect the right to privacy of Australian’s online. In response to the privacy breach at Sony in which more then 1.5 million Australian user accounts were compromised, the Minister for Privacy, Brendan O’Connor has […]
DATE: 27 April 2011 The Law Council has released a progress report on the implementation of the Australian Government’s Human Rights Framework. The Law Council of Australia says that the framework appears to be making a positive difference in raising awareness about human rights in the community. In a media release Law Council of Australia […]
DATE: 27th of April 2011 The federally funded National School Chaplaincy Program (NSCP) is facing a constitutional challenge in the High Court. Ron Williams, a concerned parent from Queensland has brought forward the challenge claiming that the program has created a non-secular pro-Christian culture in the state schools his children attend. Introduced by John Howard in […]
NAVIGATING THE GREY AREA BETWEEN LEGITIMACY AND LEGALITY The crisis in Libya is getting intense media coverage in Australia. This is primarily because of the scale, pace and brutality of the events unfolding there. After last week’s Security Council Resolution 1973 though, the Libyan crisis has become more relevant to us for another reason: Australia’s […]
In October last year, Queensland put a woman and her partner on trial for a crime that should not be on the statute books. Tegan Leach and Sergie Brennan were charged under sections 225 and 226 of the Queensland Criminal Code 1899 because Brennan asked his sister overseas to import misoprostol, a drug used for […]
Jeff Sparrow is an Australian author and editor of literary journal Overland. Last month he, along with Elizabeth O’Shea, a Melbourne lawyer working on public interest litigation, wrote an open letter to Julia Gillard about their concern for the wellbeing of WikiLeaks spokesperson Julian Assange. Mr Assange was arrested in London on December 7 on […]
It’s 8.20 on a Monday evening and a small man with nothing much to distinguish him, except perhaps his lack of shoes, is sprawled in the middle of the footpath on Mitchell Street, the main drag in Darwin. It’s the end of the dry season so the nights are unforgivably hot and sweaty. The town […]
That Australia is the only democracy in the world without a law to protect human rights is not a situation that can persist forever. So thinks most of the community. As far as our parliament is concerned, it has been very slow to respond to the need to legislate better protection of rights, in particular […]
For a garment designed to conceal, the burqa has managed to attract more than its fair share of attention. In France, where the burqa is worn by roughly 1900 women, or 0.3 per cent of the population, it was nevertheless deemed worthy of a blanket ban in all public spaces. Here in Australia, calls for […]
