Castan Centre for Human Rights Law

Category: Auslaw

  • Our Prime Minister’s Sri Lanka performance: a human rights disaster

    By Sarah Joseph AAP/Pau Osborne   Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s performance over human rights in Sri Lanka in the last week was an utter disaster. His statements seemed to brush aside some of the most fundamental human rights values: prohibitions on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and torture. Context Sri Lanka finished a decades-long civil…

  • The High Court – coming to a Centre Stage near you

    By Sarah Joseph In coming months, the High Court – the highest court in Australia and the final arbiter on the meaning of the Constitution – will decide several high-profile cases. These decisions, which may result in the striking down of legislation passed by parliaments across Australia, will reverberate both politically and socially throughout the…

  • 2014 Global Interns Take Off

    Global Interns (Clockwise from top left) Ruvini Leitan, Sally Harris, Claerwen O’Hara, Isabella Royce, Chandni Dhingra and Kelsey Paske. The Castan Centre has again awarded exciting internship opportunities to eight Monash law students with a strong and longstanding interest in human rights. Here, meet the exceptional students who will bring their skills to a diverse…

  • Guest Blog: The unravelling of civil liberties in Queensland

    Guest blogger: Kate Galloway The Queensland government has recently implemented a raft of legislation designed to deal with a ‘crisis’ of (bikie) gang related crime. The new laws: Declare certain organisations to be criminal organisations (Crime and Misconduct Regulations 2005; Criminal Code (Criminal Organisation) Regulations 2013) Criminalise attendance at prescribed premises (Criminal Code) Make it…

  • Prisons – Help or Hindrance?

    By Adam Fletcher Prisons are rarely out of the news – just this month there has been talk of establishing a separate one for bikie gang members in Queensland where inmates would be confined for 23 hours a day. Clearly, such an initiative is based on the popular theory that more and tougher prisons will…

  • Latest Case Law Trends: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

    By Sarah Joseph The case law of the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC), which oversees the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights  (ICCPR) and hears individual complaints under the ICCPR’s first Optional Protocol, is always varied and dependent upon the cases submitted to it. Nevertheless, trends can be identified. Its earliest case law was dominated by allegations of…