The 5 Catholic Worker pacifists who in February 2003 disarmed a US Navy warplane at Shannon airport in the ‘neutral’ Republic of Ireland have just endured their third trial for 10 counts of criminal damage and were today acquitted on all counts. Their principal defence was that they had ‘lawful excuse’ to damage the plane, […]
A momentous act of the nascent UN Human Rights Council cannot go unheralded. Who would have thought this brand new institution — created earlier this year to replace the UN Commission on Human Rights, but ranking alongside the Security Council — would take the plunge and adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples? […]
A little bit of human rights history was made in south-eastern Australia yesterday when the parliament of Victoria passed laws protecting civil and political rights. The Australian Capital Territory has had a Human Rights Act since 2004, but this is the first major jurisdiction in Australia, the first state, to pass human rights legislation. Western […]
Outgoing UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has previously condemned the US-led war on Iraq as illegal. He has also called for the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba to be closed. Yesterday, he praised the Bush Administration‘s decision to respect Guantánamo detainees’ inalienable legal rights to the protection afforded by common article 3 of the […]
I've written previously of my admiration for Australia's man-in-London, human rights giant Geoffrey Robertson QC. There's another Australian member of the bar I adore: that cultured man of compassion, the erudite and articulate Mr Julian Burnside, who, in and beyond his impressive legal practice in Melbourne, works tirelessly to promote human rights. Despite a large […]
Michael Gawenda, former editor-in-chief of Melbourne's only broadsheet, The Age, and now its US correspondent, does not mince his words. He describes David Hicks, that 30 year-old British-Australian on whose behalf I and many others have argued vigorously for a fair trial or else release from Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay, as "obviously innocent." It […]
Even Afghanistan insisted its citizens be released from Guantánamo. Why is David Hicks, with dual British and Australian citizenship, still there after nearly five years? Why is anyone still there after the decision of the US Supreme Court that the proposed military tribunals are unlawful? Why is Australia still supporting the continued detention and attempts […]
Norman Aisbett wrote a terrific profile of Australian-Irish pacifist Ciaron O’Reilly in the ‘Weekend Extra’ section of The West Australian newspaper on 20 May 2006 (which unfortunately is not available online, but I quote it below). He describes how in 2003 O’Reilly and four fellow activists broke into a hangar at Shannon Airport near Limerick […]
The Cuban hit song Guantánamera celebrates the women of the seaside town of Guantánamo. The lyrics speak of seeking refuge in the mountains in preference to the seashore. There are about 460 involuntary Guantánamero (men) who might echo that sentiment. That such a place as the US detainment camps at Guantánamo exists at all, when […]
Conflicting rights claims are inevitable and it helps to have some fair, principled ways of sorting them out. A professor of law belonging to the Eualeyai and Kamillaroi nations, Larissa Behrendt cites the controversial case from the Northern Territory of Australia of a 55 year-old indigenous man convicted of raping a 14 year-old indigenous girl […]
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