Castan Centre for Human Rights Law

Category: Auslaw

  • The ethics of enforced child vaccinations

    By Dr Paula Gerber The debate around whether children should be vaccinated against illness such as the measles and whooping cough tends to be highly emotive and divisive, with the medical profession on one side talking about epidemics and quoting lots of scientific data, and concerned parents on the other side, recounting heart-wrenching stories of…

  • Human Rights in the Federal Budget Part 2: The Attorney-General’s Department

    By Adam McBeth The Attorney-General’s Department has trumpeted the commitment of an additional $130 million in the next year “to improve access to justice for all Australians.” The bulk of that amount will be spent on the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse, with a further $23.5 million split between Community Legal Centres,…

  • Human Rights in the Federal Budget Part 1: Creative Accounting and Overseas Aid

    By Adam McBeth Following Tuesday’s budget, much has been made of the government’s deferral (yet again) of the commitment to increase spending on official development assistance (or overseas aid) to 0.5% of gross national income until 2017-18. This amounts to a cut of $1.9 billion from previously forecast aid levels over the period to June…

  • Hurting the most vulnerable: the Disability Discrimination Act does not apply to immigration law

    By Adam Fletcher I have already written on this blog about religious exemptions to the various federal anti‑discrimination laws, but there is another exemption which gets less coverage than it deserves. Section 52 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) says that the Act does not ‘affect discriminatory provisions in,’ or ‘render unlawful anything that…

  • Circumventing the system: no, not the asylum seekers, the government

    By Azadeh Dastyari On 9 April 2013, 66 Sri Lankan asylum seekers sailed into Geraldton harbour in Western Australia. Their arrival was met with great alarm by politicians and the media. It had been a long time since any asylum seekers had reached the mainland, and none had ever made it so far south. The…

  • Shell Has No Case to Answer on Nigeria

    Joanna Kyriakakis On Thursday last week, the United States Supreme Court delivered a judgment that rewrites the rules on international human rights litigations. In Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum the Court decided that an idiosyncratic US law dating from 1789, the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), does not apply to events that occur in the territories…