Castan Centre for Human Rights Law

From 2003 to 2007, Dan Mori (often known by his first name, Michael or Major Mori) represented Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee, David Hicks. The Castan Centre was proud to have former Lieutenant Colonel Mori give the keynote address at our recent human rights gala in October 2012. In the twenty minute video below, Mr Mori […]

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 32,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 7 Film Festivals Click here to see the complete report.

News has broken today that the Commonwealth Government has postponed plans for a Constitutional referendum to recognise Indigenous peoples in Australia’s Constitution.  According to Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin, the decision was made because there is insufficient community awareness of the proposal. Kerry Arabena, who is Director of Research for the School for Indigenous Health at Monash […]

The Hon Susan Ryan AO is Australia’s first ever Age Discrimination Commissioner. We were fortunate enough to host her at our annual conference on 20 July this year and have posted two videos below. In this 5 minute Q&A Susan Ryan discusses the prevalence of age discrimination, whether or not Australian law adequately protects older […]

Allan Asher is the former Commonwealth Ombudsman and an outspoken advocate for the rights of asylum seekers. He also recently participated in SBS’ hit show “Go Back to Where You Came From”. We were fortunate enough to host him at our annual conference on 20 July this year and have posted two videos below. In […]

Professor Tim Flannery is one of Australia’s leading experts on climate change. We were fortunate enough to host him at our annual conference on 20 July this year and have posted two videos below. In this 5 minute Q&A video, Professor Flannery discusses the difficulty of motivating people to fix an inter-generational problem, the need to […]

Paris Aristotle AM is the Director of the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture Inc (also known as Foundation House), a position he has held since helped found the organisation in 1987. He was recently a member of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers and discussed the Expert Panel’s report in conversation with Michael Gordon, the National […]

Professor the Hon Gareth Evans AO QC is one of the world’s leading experts on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. We were fortunate enough to host him at our annual conference on 20 July this year and have posted two videos below. In this 7 minute Q&A video, Professor Evans discusses R2P and explains […]

We were very fortunate to host Tunisian blogger and anti-censorship activist Sami Ben Gharbia at our annual conference on 20 July this year.  Below are two videos of Mr Ben Gharbia, who is a founding Director of Global Voices Advocacy and Co-founder of the Tunisian award-winning collective blog nawaat.org. In this nine-minute Q&A video, shot […]

As many readers would know, the Castan Centre’s annual conference – Human Rights 2012 – is on this Friday in Melbourne.   The conference is a sellout, however you can follow the twitter feed through @castanevents (a real-time stream of the event) or @castancentre (where we’ll just tweet the highlights).  We will also start publishing […]