For the first time, we have a Bill that offers a real opportunity for support across the parliament and an opportunity to realise the hopes and dreams of the many lesbian and gay Australians and their families, friends and colleagues who just want to be treated equally under Australian law and marry the person they love.
Read MoreThis week marks four years since then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that no person seeking asylum by boat would ever be allowed to stay in Australia. Instead, people fleeing persecution would be warehoused indefinitely on the remote Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru.
Read MoreIf you are reading this on your computer, phone or tablet, chances are it was made in China by a worker like 18-year-old Xiao Ya.
Xiao left her home town in rural China to find work to help support her ageing parents. She got a job cleaning tablet screens in Guangzhou, in one of the big factories which produce 90 per cent of the world's electronics.
Read MoreAustralia now looks certain to take a seat at the UN’s Human Rights Council, but will Australia play a spoiling or constructive role? The Human Rights Law Centre’s Tom Clarke takes a look at Australia’s track record in Geneva.
Read More“Tough on crime” was a stance that coloured many policies of the former Country Liberal Government in the Northern Territory. It was sold as the silver bullet to drive down youth crime rates and make communities safer. It was built up to be the solution to community fears of a so-called epidemic in youth crime that was fuelled by a willing media.
Read MoreYouth justice in Victoria is at the crossroads. The Supreme Court has ruled, yet again, that it was unlawful for the Victorian government to lock up children at the state’s most notorious maximum security adult jail.
Read MoreMandatory sentences are not the right tool for reducing crime, writes our Executive Director, Hugh de Kretser, following the misguided policy announcement from Victoria's Opposition Leader.
Read MoreIf we’ve learnt anything from the #LetThemStay campaign. If we’ve learnt anything from Baby Asha and the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital. If we’ve learnt anything from the church sanctuary movement, it’s this: on this issue, we can’t sit back and hope for leadership from our politicians. It’s you who must lead them.
Read MoreOn the eve of a fresh Supreme Court challenge to stop the Andrews Government keeping young people in Barwon prison, a 17-year-old offender has revealed the toll of being in the State’s most secure adult jail.
Read MoreQueensland MPs stand at a crossroads when it comes to the state's abortion laws, but one thing is abundantly clear: the status quo is unacceptable. New polling released this week shows overwhelming public support for women's right to choose abortion in Queensland and that voters are turned off by MPs who support criminalising abortion.
Read MoreTo achieve the Close the Gap measures, the federal and territory governments need to engage in genuine dialogue with Aboriginal people. The chronic crisis of overcrowding can only be addressed through a collaborative approach, with a view to ultimately giving control back to Aboriginal communities.
Read MoreWomen in the Northern Territory are being told that they still can’t be trusted to make decisions about their bodies. That’s the message that comes through in a discussion paper released by the Northern Territory Government proposing changes to the Territory’s abortion laws.
Read MoreTrump is set to sign executive orders imposing a freeze on all refugee resettlement – those detained offshore should be brought to safety in Australia.
Read MoreOver the weekend, millions of demonstrators across the world took to the streets with a clear message for the new U.S. President: if you tread on women's rights, you've got a fight on your hands. It was a stunning display of the dynamic relationship between the state and its people and how democracy continues to operate in between elections.
Read MoreWhile the exhibition, Another Day in Paradise which opens at the Campbelltown Arts Centre on Friday, is a chance to reflect on his life and the brutality of the death penalty, we mustn't shy away from a difficult home truth: the Australian Federal Police's role in his death.
Read MoreJust a day after Victoria’s highest court confirmed the government acted unlawfully in detaining children at the Barwon adult prison, the Minister has tried yet again to keep them there. The government is spending extraordinary resources defending the indefensible – jailing children in the state’s most notorious adult prison.
Read MoreThere is indeed a crisis in Victoria's youth justice system. It is not one, as the Government suggests, of available beds or suitable facilities – these things are imminently fixable with a dose of political will. Rather, the crisis is one of a myopic outlook and a merciless attitude: a willingness to countenance cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
Read MoreBrutal images of Aboriginal women and children being mistreated in custody are a defining feature of 2016. From Dylan Voller and the young detainees of Don Dale to Ms Dhu, Australians have been forced to reckon with the cruel reality of Australia's over-imprisonment crisis.
Read MoreI've just returned from Barwon maximum security adult prison. I found myself squatting on the floor to talk to one of our clients – a 16-year-old child – through the trapdoor to his cell. The tight steel opening so small I could only see his anxious eyes. He is being held in solitary confinement; pacing his cell, uncertain when he will be let out. He hasn't seen the sky since Thursday.
Read MoreWe need to get to the bottom of what went wrong with the riot at the Parkville Youth Justice Centre. We don’t need lazy, kneejerk populist responses, like transferring kids to adults jails, which are designed to sound tough on crime and which in fact will only make things worse.
Read MoreMalcolm Turnbull’s proposed lifetime visa ban is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist and an attempt to distract us from one that does.
The proposal is absurd, the wedge politics cynical and the explanations insincere. Sadly, the fear and harm being caused is real.
Read MoreLate last year, a friend told me that we need to make sure we don't look back in the future on human rights as just a passing phase. It was a comment that kept coming back to me over the past 12 months with Brexit, the re-rise of Pauline Hanson, the hardening of Turnbull and now Trump.
Read MoreLast year, Kumanjayi Langdon, a proud and respected 59-year-old Warlpiri man from a large family, died in police custody in Darwin.
His crime? Police suspected he was drinking in a local park. He wasn’t causing any disruption and was polite and cooperative at all times.
Read MoreDragged from her cell. Handcuffed and paralysed. Hauled, dying, into the back of a police truck. This week Australia may be confronted, yet again, with images and footage of the justice system failing Aboriginal people, with devastating results.
Read MoreOur Prime Minister, Immigration Minister and Foreign Minister have spent this week in New York attending high-profile global summits on refugees. They arrived insisting that the Australian government's policies were the "best in the world", but they'll leave having offered little more than self-congratulations.
Read MoreWhile the nation's eyes have been on federal parliament bickering over the marriage equality plebiscite this week, another critical LGBTI debate began in the Victorian Legislative Assembly.
Read MoreThe PNG government has conceded that the Manus facility must close. But while tearing down the fences would be a significant step, the real issue is not the future of the facility itself but of the 854 men trapped inside it.
Read MoreAustralia’s offshore camps are a house of cards. They’re unsustainable and liable to collapse amid increasing corporate aversion to complicity in abuse, legal uncertainty and human despair.
Read MorePrime Minister Malcom Turnbull's announcement of a royal commission into the abuse of children in Northern Territory jails gives an insight into his instincts on human rights.
Read MoreMonday night's Four Corners episode also revealed that cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is endemic in its principal youth detention facility.
Read MoreEvery day that the Manus Island and Nauru camps stay open, people suffer. Every day that Ferrovial operates those centres, it is exposed to risk, writes the HRLC's Rachel Ball.
Read MoreThe Universal Periodic Review (UPR) has received mixed reviews about its effectiveness as a mechanism to achieve positive human rights change. However, the case study of Australia demonstrates the capacity of the UPR to open space for dialogue and facilitate positive, albeit modest, human rights progress and monitoring.
Read MoreThe PNG Supreme Court's unanimous ruling highlights the harmfulness of Australia's treatment of asylum seekers in the Manus Island detention centre.
Read MoreIt’s been twenty-five years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, yet WA’s justice system remains utterly out of balance – it is destroying families and communities, writes the HRLC’s Ruth Barson.
Read MoreThis article was written for the special 2016 Children Rights Edition of the HRLC Monthly Bulletin, Rights Agenda, developed in collaboration with the National Children’s and Youth Law Centre, King & Wood Mallesons and the Human Rights Law Centre.
Read MoreNSW's new anti-protest laws are the latest example of governments in Australia steadily chipping away at our democracy's foundations, writes the HRLC's Hugh de Kretser.
Read MoreAttacks on environmental groups are part of an unmistakable broader trend of governments eroding many of the vital foundations our democracy, writes the HRLC's Hugh de Kretser.
Read MoreKelsey Montgomery a law student at the University of Western Australia. She did a placement with the Human Rights Law Centre at the end of 2015 and has since written this piece looking at the legality of solitary confinement.
Read MoreIf Australia is serious about protecting human rights, it should codify and enforce them, writes the HRLC's Ruth Barson on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Read MoreThese are the questions that should be plaguing the WA government after an inquest heard of a brutal and inhuman death in custody, writes the HRLC's Ruth Barson.
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