Voting is compulsory in Australia, but only possible if you are enrolled to vote. You don't automatically go on the roll when you turn 18 or acquire citizenship. You have to enrol by filling out a simple form and sending it to the Australian Electoral Commission. Although a national election is imminent, an estimated 1.4 […]
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 […]
Before dawn on 28 June, Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya (left) was 'pulled from his bed' in the presidential palace and forced into exile in Costa Rica, still in his pyjamas. That afternoon Roberto Micheletti, of the same party as Zelaya (the PLH), was sworn in for a 7-month term as caretaker President, with elections due […]
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 […]
The Australian Government today gave its formal support to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma (pictured right), called it a "giant step": "another milestone in the new partnership forged between Indigenous peoples and governments in February last year with the National Apology […]
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 […]
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