"The violation of human rights in this Territory is massive." So found the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, on a visit to Gaza this week. She went to Beit Hanoun, a town in northern Gaza which the Israeli army shelled heavily on 8 November. Nineteen people were killed, all of them civilian. […]
Some three years after his capture, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been convicted and sentenced by the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal in connection with the killing of 148 people from a Shiite village called al-Dujail in 1982, apparently in revenge for an assassination attempt. Saddam Hussein and his co-accused ought not to be executed […]
Inspired by the extraordinary physical-theatre production called Honour Bound playing at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne until 1 October 2006, I here reproduce Guantánamo Bay detainee David Hicks’ affidavit describing his treatment while in US detention: DAVID M. HICKS, being duly sworn, deposes and says: 1. I am David M. Hicks, a Petitioner in the […]
Eleven years after Europe’s largest mass murder since World War Two, there is the prospect of justice for the victims and survivors of the massacre of over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the UN ‘safe haven’ in Srebrenica. The trial of seven former Bosnian Serb officers began last month at the International Criminal Tribunal for the […]
Business suits or pantyhose. Former British PM Margaret Thatcher is said to consult her lawyers before travelling abroad for fear of being arrested for international crimes (for ordering the sinking of Argentine warship the General Belgrano as it sailed away from the conflict during the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982, at the expense of 323 lives). […]
Esteemed human rights barrister and judge Geoffrey Robertson QC has always been a hero of mine. (Strictly speaking, Fred Astaire was a hero of mine long before I'd heard of Robertson and his Hypotheticals. I was devastated when my mother told me that Astaire probably wouldn't be available for tap lessons, but Robertson has never […]
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