Castan Centre for Human Rights Law

Author: Castan Centre

  • 2014 Castan Human Rights Report: Gender-based violence – beyond the first 20 years

    By Heli Askola Despite many advances in preventing gender-based violence, one in three Australian women over the age of 15 has experienced physical or sexual violence and roughly one woman a week is killed by their partner or ex-partner. As some commentators have pointed out, these figures dwarf the incidence of ‘one-punch assaults’ or shark…

  • 2014 Castan Human Rights Report: Human rights in “closed” environments

    By Julie Debeljak, Bronwyn Naylor and Anita Mackay Protecting the human rights of people in “closed environments” is crucial because the people detained in these facilities are removed from public scrutiny.  Their relative powerlessness creates a serious risk of human rights abuse by staff members and fellow detainees. Closed environments are places where people are…

  • 2014 Castan Human Rights Report: Australia’s growing prisons crisis

    By Bronwyn Naylor Governments around the world have invested in prisons as places for the punishment of offenders. They are expensive, harmful and overused. In Australia, prisons are becoming increasingly overcrowded, and their populations demonstrate striking levels of vulnerability and disadvantage. There were 29,383 prisoners (sentenced and unsentenced) in Australian prisons at 30 June 2012,…

  • 2014 Castan Human Rights Report: ASIO’s human rights problem

    By Patrick Emerton Last year, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s annual report referred to ‘terrorism’ more than 60 times while the phrase ‘human rights’ appeared once. This discrepancy reflects ASIO’s willingness to prioritise its search for terrorists even when it may come at considerable expense to human rights. The report, tabled in parliament last October…

  • An open letter to Prime Minister Tony Abbott

    On 2 March, over 500 academics from more than 30 Australian universities (including Castan Centre Directors and Associates) signed a letter to the Prime Minister calling for the immediate closure of the detention centres on Manus Island and in Nauru. Academics can still add their names at this link.  We have reprinted the full text of the…

  • New book offers a different perspective on torture

    A new book by Castan Centre Associate Dr Ronli Sifris, providing another angle on a feminist understanding of international human rights, will be launched in early March. The book, Reproductive Freedom, Torture and International Human Rights: Challenging the Masculinisation of Torture, examines restrictions on reproductive freedom through the lens of the right to be free from torture…