To further the debate over whether Australia should have laws protecting human rights, the Castan Centre is engaging in a spot of myth-busting: Myth 1: The proposed Human Rights Act would shift decision making to unelected judges who should not have the power to decide what constitutes a breach of human rights. The reality: Australian […]
Expatriate Australian journalist John Pilger (right), in accepting the Sydney Peace Prize last week, was very critical of silence and lies in Australian polity and complicit bystanders among the Australian press and public. He calls us from slumber to form a 'Fifth Estate' of citizen monitoring — that eternal vigilance that is the price of […]
Gentle reader, May I share with you two things that have come across my desk this evening which have had a profound impact on me? One is an 8-minute video by Oxfam about the life of a woman in rural Uganda facing the 'indescribable pain' of climate change. The second is an article in the […]
Key nuclear states Israel, North Korea, India & Pakistan remain non-signatories to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). What is your government's current position on the treaty and issues under review? The next review conference will be held at the UN in New York City in May next year. This Japanese call from arms invites […]
To quote a press release issued today on behalf of those presently involved in this anti-war protest in northern Australia: Christian Activists enter restricted military area during live-fire exercises Four nonviolent Christian activists have entered the Shoalwater Bay Training Area this morning to stop the Talisman Saber exercises. Calling themselves 'the Bonhoeffer 4' after Kevin […]
Australia has a human rights defender on a par with Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler for his stance against Nazi Germany, yet William Cooper is little known in Australia today. Appalled by the vicious carnage of Kristallnacht, the watershed pogrom of November 1938, Aboriginal leader Bill Cooper (right) led a protest walk from his home […]
Dear National Human Rights Consultation Committee, I would like to submit to the Committee Geoffrey Robertson's Statute of Liberty: How Australians can Take Back their Rights (Vintage, Sydney 2009) in its entirety. I hope he has done so already. I'm sure you have it. I work in human rights, and I thought I had heard […]
When people like Desmond Tutu describe the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories as apartheid, it's not mere hyperbole. Israel's self-proclaimed 'policy of separation' seeks to segregate Palestinians and Jews in the West Bank, writes Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard. Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning literally, separateness. It's hard to see how Israel's policy […]
Alberto Fujimori has been sentenced to 25 years' gaol for 'human rights crimes'. The former President of Peru was yesterday found guilty of ordering 2 massacres of civilians in 1991 and 1992, during the 'dirty war' with violent Maoist rebel movement Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) that saw more than 70,000 Peruvians disappeared or killed. A […]
While she was inside, prison authorities refused to allow indigenous activist Vicki Roach to give media interviews about her remarkable 2007 High Court Constitutional challenge. Instead, she wrote a letter to Anita Barraud of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation outlining some of her arguments: "Excluding us from the democratic process while we are in prison, however […]
Follow rightsbase on 