Former chief justice Alastair Nicholson has written a scathing rebuttal of Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock’s defence of his government’s abandonment of David Hicks, the Australian citizen still imprisoned by the US at Guantánamo Bay after more than five years. Nicholson’s point, made clearly and authoritatively, is that Hicks cannot get a fair trial by US […]
Homeless people in France will have legal redress if a draft bill is passed in the current parliamentary session. Homelessness was forced onto the French political agenda when fires in inadequate, overcrowded Paris housing killed almost 50 people in 2005. The issue has been kept alive by the ‘Children of Don Quixote’, a small voluntary […]
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says 84 journalists were killed worldwide in 2006. Include media support staff such as interpreters and drivers, and that figure climbs to 177, the worst on record. At least 155 of those were murders and unexplained deaths, according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the remaining 22 being […]
Extra-judicial killings are a major source of human rights violation in Asia, according to the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), and, of eleven countries reviewed in the Commission’s 2006 Report on human rights in the region, Sri Lanka is the worst. On this second anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami, reconstruction in the north-east of […]
Rioting erupted on the streets of Tonga on 16 November. Police and soldiers were given emergency powers while Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand sent in troops. Shortly thereafter reports emerged of maltreatment of prisoners in custody. Some of those said to have been abused were peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators with no involvement in the unrest. Tongan soldiers […]
Iraqi refugee Mohammed Sagar (pictured), the last person detained by Australia on the island of Nauru, is to swap Pacific heat for Nordic sleet — and freedom. Despite winning a court order forcing the Australian Government to reveal why this undisputed refugee is still imprisoned after more than five years, Sagar has been offered asylum […]
The General Assembly of the UN, meeting in New York, has decided to defer consideration of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for up to a year. After decades of negotiations, the text of the Declaration was approved by the UN Human Rights Council in June. This deferral of the final vote by […]
"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 […]
Congratulations to Scott Parkin (pictured), Mohammed Sagar and Muhammed Faisal, who today won their bid to find out what the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation has against them. The Federal Court has decided that they are entitled to know the reason why, in Parkin’s case, he was thrown out of the country, and in the case […]
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