By Alana Lazdins. In his exhibition, My Dad the People Smuggler, Australian artist Phuong Ngo recounts through film, interview and photography the story of the Vietnamese diaspora caused by the military victory of the Vietnam People’s Army in Saigon, and the subsequent rise of communism in 1975. Ngo’s father helped refugees to flee communist Vietnam, […]
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 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 […]
By Mohamad Tabbaa. This article is part of our February 2013 focus on Religion and Human Rights. “Why do Muslims hate freedom of speech?” This question is becoming increasingly common in many parts of the world, and has been raised recently in Australia in regards to the anti-Muslim film of 2012. It is now again […]
By Tim Costello. This article is part of our February 2013 focus on Religion and Human Rights. Join Right Now in an interactive online discussion with World Vision Australia CEO Tim Costello on Tuesday 19 February 2013, from 12.00 to 1.00 pm. Tim will be online to respond to your comments and questions in the ‘comments’ section of […]
By Jessica Szwarcbord. In the beginning of the post-9/11 era it seemed that no one could stop the United States from aggressively retaliating in any way it wished. A freight train blasting through a new landscape, sculpted by the uncertainty and terror of the catastrophic plane-into-building event that has become a ‘where-were-you-when?’ moment in all […]
By Holly Kendall. Australia has just spent at least 24 million dollars to win a seat on the United Nations Security Council. Right Now investigates how Australia can use its seat to advance human rights in Australia. The Security Council was formed in 1945 under the United Nations Charter with the “primary responsibility for the […]
By Dr Peter Wigg. I have recently returned to Melbourne after fifteen months on a reconstructive surgery program for victims of armed conflict in the Middle East. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), for whom I worked, has hired hospital and accommodation space in Amman in Jordan, and brings patients there on short-term visas from Iraq, Yemen, […]
This article is a guest post from the Chairperson of our Board, Lizzie O’Shea. The Apollo Theatre in Harlem was jammed full of people for the recent US Presidential candidate debate. A community forum preceded the televised event, with local activists of all persuasions. Insightful questions were thrown to the panel from the floor and […]
By Natalie Sambhi. This piece is part of our September focus on Women’s Rights. See all of this month’s articles here. Of the Defence issues raised over the past 12 months, none has been more controversial than the government’s decision to lift a ban on gender discrimination in the military which means women are eligible to […]
Police accused of racial profiling Concerns are mounting over African and Muslim communities being unfairly targeted by police in street patrols. Tamar Hopkins, a lawyer from the Flemington and Kensington Legal Centre in Melbourne’s inner-west, says that the police may actually be breaking the law themselves if they are in fact racial profiling. Sydney based […]
By Ryan Paine. Please use your liberty to promote ours. – Aung San Suu Kyi In the year or so I’ve been living and working in Southeast Asia, there have been two moments when I genuinely yearned to be home: when I smelt a glass of shiraz from South Australia; and when I was stuck […]