Women the world over share a one-in-three risk of physical or sexual abuse, with rates reaching 70% in some countries. In Australia, over 400,000 men were violent towards women in 2005. Almost 1.3 million Australian women have experienced physical and sexual violence from a current or former partner. Women are at risk of violence in […]
Adolf Hitler is said to have assumed impunity for his Final Solution with a rhetorical, ‘Who remembers Armenians?’ His dismissive reference to the 1915-18 genocide of some 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman empire overlooks the genocide of 750,000 Assyrians by the same regime. The Christian population of the Middle East — from the Copts […]
US philosopher and mensch Richard Rorty died this month, aged 75. He observed that "philosophy occupies an important place in culture only when things seem to be falling apart." A reluctant pragmatist, Emeritus Professor Rorty saw a path to realising human rights by appealling to hearts rather than minds: ‘If, like many of us, you […]
In the US, it’s a word so offensive that white people, at least, only ever refer to it as the ‘N’ word. In that peculiar vein of Australian humour (where your best mate is a bastard and a mongrel), a blond, white footballer Edward Stanley Brown was nicknamed ‘Nigger’ and that word is emblazoned on […]
Ordinary people are doing extraordinary things to oppose the war in Iraq; courageous, costly things. And more than just expressing opposition, some are acting to prevent war crimes being committed. This month, four ‘Christians Against All Terrorism’ were pursued through the courts by the Australian Government for breaking into the secret US military facility Pine […]
Recruiting child soldiers under the age of 18 is a crime under international law. Recruiting children under the age of 15 is a war crime. The International Criminal Court‘s first trial will be that of DRC warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, charged with recruiting child soldiers as young as 10. The term ‘child soldier’ refers to […]
Advancing the global campaign against explosive remnants of war, Belgium has taken the unprecedented step of banning investment in companies that manufacture cluster bombs. Belgium banned the weapon itself a year ago. Cluster munitions spread ‘bomblets’ — hundreds or thousands at a time — over wide areas from 1 to 20 square kilometres. Unlike landmines, […]
At least 57 countries have signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance since it was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December last year. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, says the new treaty articulates limits in the 'war on terror.' Whatever the goal, secret detention […]
Acclaimed Harvard legal academic Mary Ann Glendon's A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Random House, New York 2001) is a great read for anyone with more than a passing interest in human rights. It does what good history writing should do: help us understand where we are today. […]
When a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) was finally established in The Hague in 1998, its founding document contained four classes of major crimes that could be heard by the Court. Three of them are genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, each with legal precedent and a clear definition in the Rome Statute establishing […]
Follow rightsbase on 