Castan Centre for Human Rights Law

Author: Sarah Joseph

  • Tweeting human rights and two Revolutions (so far)

    Sarah Joseph The Castan Centre’s twitter account (@castancentre) is intended to disseminate news of relevance to human rights, usually consisting of a short descriptor (very occasionally with attempted wit) followed by a link to a story.  To give a sample of its flavour, many of the links below are to our twitter feed (and you…

  • The Giffords shooting: a view from the Antipodes

    Sarah Joseph Happy New Year everybody! This afternoon I write about a sad event that took place on Sunday morning (Melbourne time) in Tucson, Arizona. A US Democrat Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in an attempted assassination in which many others were wounded, and six others died. At the time of writing, the hopes for…

  • Reflections on Wikileaks

    By Sarah Joseph Gosh. This Wikileaks story is just running and running. And with thousands more cables to be released (only a small percentage of the quarter of a million in Wikileaks’ possession have been published so far), it isn’t going to leave the front pages soon. To add to the intrigue, there has been…

  • Developments in Twitter Defamation case.

    By Sarah Joseph My blog on Sunday regarding this issue had an unprecedented number of hits for the Castan blog, indicating a great level of interest in this story. The hits may also reflect that relatively little attention has been paid to this issue in the mainstream media, hence more reliance on blogs and especially…

  • Defamation, Twitter and Free Speech

    Sarah Joseph An extraordinary thing happened in Australia’s media community last week. Julie Posetti, a journalism lecturer and prolific tweeter, attended a journalism conference in Sydney. One of the speakers was Asa Wahlquist, who used to write climate change articles for the Australian.  The Australian has been under some fire recently for its perceived conservative bias (see,…

  • The UN, Executions, and GLBT rights.

    By Sarah Joseph On November 16, the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 79 to 70 (with 17 abstentions and 26 absentees), removed an explicit condemnation of killings on the basis of sexual orientation from a GA resolution. The reference to “sexual orientation” has been included in previous resolutions which condemn extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The…