Castan Centre for Human Rights Law

Tag: human rights

  • The 2015 Human Rights Report – Going to jail for not having a birth certificate? It happens

    By Paula Gerber and Melissa Castan This article is featured in the 2015 Castan Centre Human Rights Report. We will be featuring the articles on the blog throughout the month of May.  It is well known that millions of children around the world never have their births registered. UNICEF puts the total number of unregistered births at 230…

  • The 2015 Human Rights Report – Indigenous Rights 2014/5: Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts?

    By Stephen Gray and Melissa Castan This piece is featured in the 2015 Castan Centre Human Rights Report. We will be featuring the articles on the blog throughout the month of May.  In the past twelve months, Australian Indigenous affairs have witnessed three so-called ‘developments’: more weighty and bewildering government reports; more unsuccessful test cases brought by…

  • The evidence is in: you can’t link imprisonment to crime rates

    By Bronwyn Naylor Prison populations in Australia are increasing rapidly. This is usually said to be driven by increases in crime. Digging deeper though, in Australia and internationally, the link is far less clear. The extent of a country’s use of imprisonment seems in fact to be more a matter of policy choice than of…

  • Homophobia is alive and well in the world of cricket

    By Paula Gerber At World Cup cricket match on in Sydney on 8 March, between Sri Lanka and Australia, a Sri Lankan supporter waved a sign branding Australian cricketer Glen Maxwell a “fag”, in Sinhalese. The fan’s homophobic slur was certainly shocking, but even worse was the lack of any reaction in the mainstream media. Only…

  • The Debate about having a debate about a business and human rights treaty

    By Joanna Kyriakakis The current debate about the desirability of renewing discussions on a UN Business and Human Rights treaty frustrates me a little. There. I said it. I am not referring to conversations about what the substance of any treaty might look like, which will in due course be necessary. Rather, it is opposition…

  • Freedom, the sublime and the patriotic

    Speech to Castan Centre for Human Rights Law Gala Dinner by  Keynote Speaker Dr Tim Soutphommasane, Federal Race Discrimination Commissioner During the past year or so, I have been constantly asked two questions with unerring predictability. One: Should the Racial Discrimination Act be amended? Two: How is everyone getting along at the Australian Human Rights…