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Keywords: Supreme Court

  • AUSTRALIA

    Human rights in a pandemic

    • Cristy Clark
    • 30 July 2020
    9 Comments

    The need to contain the spread of COVID-19 has led to a raft of emergency laws that have challenged us to deeply consider the appropriate balance between community and individual rights. 

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Lawsuits over climate crisis risk

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 30 July 2020
    2 Comments

    On July 22, Katta O'Donnell filed an action in the Federal Court in Victoria hoping to make good her promise to put the government on trial for ‘misconduct’. The action notes that, ‘At all material times there has existed a significant likelihood that the climate is changing, and will continue to change, as the result of anthropogenic influences.’ Australia was ‘materially exposed and susceptible’ to the risks posed by climate change.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Time to dismantle the police?

    • Cristy Clark
    • 09 June 2020
    16 Comments

    We must ask: are our police forces keeping us safe? All of us? Poverty, discrimination and disempowerment cannot be solved with more policing. What if we took the money that is currently spent on policing and spent it on supporting the community?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Protecting civil liberties in a time of COVID-19

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 10 March 2020
    6 Comments

    Authorities can also be fearful, paranoid at the unruly nature of their subjects. Public health emergencies have been declared in various countries and while these are deemed necessary, they come with the exercise of broad, muscular powers.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Kiribati: What makes a 'climate refugee'?

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 24 January 2020
    10 Comments

    New Zealand's judicial channels found against the Kiribati national, claiming he did not satisfy the definition of refugee within international law. He was deported. This month, the UNHRC did not find the deportation unlawful, a move that former Fleet Street editor Damian Wilson said had 'piled on the misery in the climate change mess'.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Coal hard truths about Australia-India relations

    • Sundhya Pahuja
    • 16 January 2020
    9 Comments

    It is ironic for those of us who have long wished for a closer and more respectful relationship between India and Australia to be arguing now for caution. But perhaps the time has come for a relationship of political solidarity between the people of India and the people of Australia, rather than the economic expediency that seems to be on offer.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Secret trials in the Australian 'police state'

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 26 November 2019
    15 Comments

    It sounds like a police state effort. An author makes an attempt to assist a pseudonymously named prisoner publish a memoir. The effort is scotched by the authorities. The police spring into action raiding the cell of that prisoner, and that of his brother. All take place without the knowledge of the Australia media or public.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    On power and Koreans' American fear

    • Christine Burke
    • 04 November 2019
    4 Comments

    Anyone interested in social justice knows that structures and systems can bolster the worst tendencies of human nature, can incubate 'social sin'. Korean friends, when asked if they live in fear of North Korea, almost always tell me 'we fear America more'. To me that seemed a bit of an overstatement. Now I understand their response.

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  • RELIGION

    Child safety reforms still progressing slowly

    • John Warhurst
    • 14 October 2019
    8 Comments

    The royal commission concluded that child safety, in all its organisational ramifications, raised questions of culture and governance for the church. If the Plenary Council 2020 doesn't take such issues seriously then it will be one indicator that the momentum around last year's official national apology has slowed.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    While Thunberg creates hope, Trump stymies it

    • Jim McDermott
    • 01 October 2019
    10 Comments

    When Nancy Pelosi announced the House of Representatives would open impeachment proceedings, it seemed that finally the Trump Administration would be forced to reckon with its repeated disregard for the rule of law. Except, as Saturday Night Live's Kenan Thompson says in a hilarious sketch, 'Ain't nothin' gonna happen.'

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia's illogic over Timor and West Papua

    • Pat Walsh
    • 13 August 2019
    8 Comments

    One wonders if the Prime Minister will be aware of the supreme irony of these two events, the lack of logic in Australia's conflicting policies on the fate of the two peoples, and Canberra's flexible approach to the much vaunted international rules based order when it does not serve pragmatic national interests.

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  • MEDIA

    The thief, the party and WikiLeaks

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 02 August 2019
    4 Comments

    The running themes of the Department of Justice charges against Assange are that he is a hacker, an agent of espionage and a danger to necessary secrecy. In so slanting their case, the DOJ hopes to avoid the application of the First Amendment covering press freedoms. The reasoning of District Judge Koeltl suggests this might well fail.

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