Family submit application to Strasbourg-based court in attempt to postpone withdrawal of life support
The parents of Archie Battersbee have submitted an application to the European court of human rights (ECHR) in an attempt to postpone the withdrawal of his life support.
Lawyers acting for Hollie Dance and Paul Battersbee, from Southend-on-Sea, Essex, had been given a deadline of 9am on Wednesday to submit the application.
Highlighting the challenges created by the rapid increase in the use of the the low-Earth orbit region, a report from Flinders University has called on domestic governments to give the issue more regulatory attention. The report provides broad commentary on space uses involving satellites while highlighting challenges faced by the growing use of the low-Earth…
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Highlighting the challenges created by the rapid increase in the use of the the low-Earth orbit region, a report from Flinders University has called on domestic governments to give the issue more regulatory attention. The report provides broad commentary on space uses involving satellites while highlighting challenges faced by the growing use of the low-Earth…
The post Low-Earth orbit region is ‘limited and fragile’: Flinders University appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
This weekend, 227 Members and Senators will travel to Canberra from all corners of our continent to be sworn in on Tuesday to serve in the 47th Parliament of Australia since Federation in 1901. It will be led by the nation’s 31st Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, who as the Leader of the Labor Party, follows …
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Offenders may be kept in prison after serving sentence, but wrongly made order ‘almost always amounts to arbitrary detention’, rights group argues
A tool used by authorities to assess the risk posed by convicted terrorists before their release from prison is unreliable and should be investigated, the Australian Human Rights Commission and a peak body for Muslims have argued.
The Violent Extremism Risk Assessment 2 Revised, known as VERA-2R, is used to measure the threat posed by extremists, often when considering whether they will be subject to strict court orders once their prison sentence is completed.
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Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
When it happens to you, it can be devastating. Violating. Traumatising. But did you know it’s also rape?
I’m talking about stealthing – the non-consensual removal of a condom during sex.
Elena, who was 24 when she experienced stealthing says: “If stealthing was criminalised at the time of my incident, it would have provided me with the opportunity to take control of a situation where I had none.”
Abbie, 39 today but 26 at the time of her assault said, “I didn’t know then what had happened was rape.”
Both these women showed tremendous courage last Thursday by telling their stories to a national roundtable of law makers and leaders who are working together to change the law – and change the conversation – around stealthing and consent.
The violating practice is widespread: one in three women and one in five men who have sex with men have been victims of stealthing, according to a 2018 study by Monash University and the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre. Yet community awareness and education around the issue is limited.
The lack of awareness around stealthing is something that sexual consent advocate and Director of the Australia Institute’s newly established Centre for Sex and Gender Equality, Chanel Contos wants to change; Chanel convened the roundtable.
(You might recall that Chanel first hit the national headlines at the start of 2021 when she launched a viral online petition calling for holistic sexual consent and sexuality education.)
Chanel Contos continues to be a vocal advocate for consent and gender equality. Picture: Supplied
In her opening remarks at the roundtable, she said: “By bringing together lawmakers and victims of stealthing we hope to identify how nationally consistent legislation can prevent stealthing and increase public awareness about consent.”
She later went on to say: “Stealthing is most commonly perpetrated out of ignorance and entitlement rather than malice. This means that it is preventable. It is preventable through public awareness about this specific type of consent, and legislation is a powerful way to define what is acceptable and what is not in our society.”
Also present at the event were Attorneys-General advisors, shadow Attorneys-General, Supreme Court Judges and members of state and territory legislative councils who came together to hear from survivors about their experiences of stealthing.
Law reform on stealthing has gained momentum recently. Two weeks ago, the Queensland Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce released the second Hear Her Voice report. One of the taskforce’s 188 recommendations was to amend consent laws to include legislation around non-consensual condom removal during sex.
Currently, stealthing is a crime only in the ACT and Tasmania.
Last year, Canberra Liberals’ Leader Elizabeth Lee introduced the Crimes (Stealthing) Amendment Bill 2021, which makes it illegal to remove a condom during sex or to not use a condom at all, in circumstances when condom use was previously agreed on.
“I am incredibly proud that the ACT has passed nation-leading laws to specifically criminalise stealthing,” said Elizabeth Lee during the roundtable.
Tasmania followed suit in June, passing the Criminal Code Amendment Bill 2022, which includes stealthing as another circumstance that negates consent.
New South Wales’ affirmative consent reforms, which also came into effect in June 2022, strengthen laws by confirming that if someone consents to one sexual act, they have not consented to other sexual acts, providing stealthing as an example.
Following NSW’s approach, the Queensland Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce report recommends amending the definition of consent and providing stealthing as an example.
A review in Victoria has also recommended that stealthing be criminalised, but legislation has not yet been implemented. The Victoria Law Reform Commission’s Improving Justice System Response to Sex Offences report recommends an amendment to the Crimes Act to include stealthing as another circumstance in which consent is negated. The Victorian Government has agreed to the recommendation to criminalise stealthing and the reform is expected to come into effect later this year.
The criminalisation of stealthing is fundamental to increasing community awareness and education about sexual safety and consent.
During last week’s roundtable Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Justice at RMIT University, Dr Brianna Chesser said, “…by bringing the law into line with community values, future incidents of stealthing and the harm associated with that behaviour may be prevented.”
The current ambiguity around the legality of stealthing may reinforce a victim’s feelings of guilt and shame. As well as increasing awareness and deterrence, national law reform on stealthing will arm survivors with the language to describe what has happened to them and the knowledge that it was wrong.
Last week’s roundtable was an important milestone on the path to tackling stealthing. As someone who was in the room, I’m hopeful that best-practice law reform and community education campaigns are just around the corner.
The post Stealthing: Most people don’t know it’s rape appeared first on BroadAgenda.
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Greens senator Dorinda Cox says children at Banksia Hill being traumatised in ways that will harm them for the rest of their lives
A plan to move 20 detained children in Western Australia to a maximum-security adult prison shows the state’s justice system is broken, advocates say.
The boys, aged as young as 14, will be moved from Perth’s Banksia Hill juvenile detention centre to a standalone facility at nearby Casuarina prison.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Council’s commissioner for human rights says replacing act with British bill of rights would send ‘wrong signal’
A senior Council of Europe official has warned the UK government against weakening protections for its citizens by repealing the Human Rights Act.
Dunja Mijatović, the council’s commissioner for human rights, said on Monday that replacing the act with a British bill of rights would send the “wrong signal”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Flight could take off within weeks and before court has ruled on whether scheme is lawful
The Home Office is planning a second flight to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, which could take off before the courts have ruled on whether the scheme is lawful, the Guardian has learned.
It is understood that a second flight could take off in a matter of weeks despite the fact that the full high court hearing to examine the government’s Rwanda plans does not begin until 19 July.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
During Donald Trump’s four year term as President of the United States of America, three vacancies occurred in the ranks of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court. He nominated three ultra conservative judges to replace them and made it clear to those judges that he expected them to remove the constitutional right of women …
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Human Rights Watch calls for donors to cut off funding to security forces and urges international court to investigate
Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip systematically torture critics in detention, a practice that could amount to crimes against humanity, an international rights group has said.
In its report Human Rights Watch (HRW) called for donor countries to cut off funding to Palestinian security forces that commit such crimes and urged the international criminal court to investigate.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Exclusive: Pether, who has been imprisoned for 14 months in Baghdad, has become ‘gravely ill’ according to his family
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has raised the case of jailed engineer Robert Pether with the Iraqi leader, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, as the Australian’s family warns he has become “gravely ill” and is rapidly deteriorating in his Baghdadi jail cell.
Pether has now been imprisoned for more than 14 months following a commercial dispute between his engineering firm and Iraq’s central bank, which had hired Pether’s company to help build its new Baghdad headquarters. Pether’s family say he is innocent and the trial was unfair and compromised.
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Deputy PM says matter is ‘settled in UK law’ and he would not want Britain to be in same situation as US
Dominic Raab has expressed doubts about including the right to an abortion in the forthcoming bill of rights, saying the matter was already “settled in UK law”.
A cross-party amendment intends to enshrine the right in the bill, though abortion in England and Wales was decriminalised in the 1967 Abortion Act, which exempts women from prosecution for the procedure if it is signed off by two doctors.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Leaders of repressive regimes will have licence to ignore international human rights standards, warns Mike Cushman. Plus letters from Prof Julian Petley and Margaret Owen
Your editorial on the Tories’ new bill of rights (22 June) makes many important points. It is, however, like almost all of the discussion of this threat to human rights, depressingly narrow and inward-looking. The great danger here is the licence that putting national prejudices above international overviews will give to regimes more directly repressive that our own.
International human rights law is designed to put constraints on the most authoritarian governments. It does this in part by more liberal countries accepting restrictions on their actions and setting a platform of minimum acceptable standards. The British drafters of the European convention on human rights understood this.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
In 1968, Ann Hill discovered she was pregnant while a law student. With abortion illegal, she was forced to have a backstreet operation. She explains how it inspired her to become a women’s rights campaigner
When the doctor told me I was pregnant, he said most women were “extremely happy” with this news. I said: “Well, I’m not, and I would like to end this pregnancy.” He told me I would have to go before a committee at the hospital to determine whether a termination was necessary to save my life, including a psychiatrist’s report, and that it would take several weeks. And what would be the chance they would agree? “I can’t help you,” he said.
It was 1968 and I was 22, living in New Haven, Connecticut, and in my first month at Yale Law School. I knew straight away that I was not going to carry a pregnancy to term, that I was very early on in the pregnancy and that it should not be a major procedure.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Liberty hails decision that prior independent authorisation is needed for people’s communications data
The security and intelligence services must acquire “prior independent authorisation” to obtain people’s communications data from telecom providers, a civil rights campaign group has said, after it won a high court challenge.
Liberty hailed a “landmark victory” and said two judges ruled it was unlawful for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to obtain individuals’ communications data from telecom providers without having prior independent authorisation during criminal investigations.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
David Wacks on youth convictions and cautions, John Hughes on the need to delete records of minor offences from decades ago, and a magistrate on the need for DBS reform
Re your article (Thousands in England and Wales locked out of jobs because of mistakes in youth, campaigners say, 21 June), it is correct that cautions given to those under 18 no longer automatically appear on enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) certificates, but the police can seek disclosure. It is possible to object to such disclosure, but those affected should be aware that even if a caution is spent for the purposes of job applications in the UK, it still prejudices the recipient for life in getting any visa to travel abroad unless they can successfully apply for the caution to be deleted.
Convictions given to those under 18 can be disclosed even if spent, but many never are. For example, a person might be convicted of arson for throwing a cigarette in a bin, rather than it being recorded that they were caught smoking outside their school. Had the conviction been for criminal damage, or had it been a caution, they would not have a lifetime punishment.
Exclusive: Drop prompts warnings ministers’ attacks on lawyers could be having chilling effect on judges
Successful high court challenges to government policy and decisions by public bodies have fallen dramatically, prompting warnings that ministers’ attacks on lawyers could be having a chilling effect on judges.
The proportion of civil judicial reviews in England and Wales, excluding immigration cases, which claimants won out of total claims lodged fell by 50% on 2020, according to analysis seen by the Guardian. The figure is 26% if the success rate is measured out of cases that went to a final hearing.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Child’s case argued that practice of naming surrogate mother’s husband breached her human rights
A six-year-old British girl who was born to a surrogate mother using an anonymous donated egg and sperm from her biological father has lost her case in the European court of human rights to have her father named on her birth certificate.
In a complex case where five people were involved in her birth – a same-sex male couple, one of whom is her biological father, a surrogate mother and her husband and the anonymous egg donor – the European court of human rights ruled the case was “manifestly unfounded”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Organisations including Index on Censorship condemn government’s claim a bill would boost freedom of expression
Free speech campaigners have condemned the UK government’s boast that the planned British bill of rights will boost freedom of expression, claiming that it will actually undermine it.
The bill, published on Wednesday, says in clause 4 that on matters of free speech “a court must give great weight to the importance of protecting the right”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Plans to make universal rights subordinate to ministerial opinion and political whim mark a backwards step for British democracy
There are two ways ministers can avoid falling foul of human rights law. One is to govern with respect for universal human rights, as codified after the second world war in response to unspeakable atrocities. The other way is to redefine those rights, making their interpretation subordinate to political expediency. Boris Johnson’s government has chosen the second path.
The method is a new bill of rights, replacing the 1998 Human Rights Act, which incorporated the 1953 European convention on human rights into UK law. The change is not a withdrawal from the European court of human rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, which adjudicates on the convention, but it is a dilution of the protections it represents.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The government’s move to override the European court of human rights will leave UK citizens all the poorer
The government’s long-threatened, misleadingly titled and highly controversial bill of rights is finally here. It has been trailed by Dominic Raab and other ministers for years, but the European court of human rights’ intervention in the disgraceful Rwanda refugee scheme last week was apparently the opportune moment to launch this unwanted, uneccessary legislation.
The Ministry of Justice has taken a hatchet to the single most powerful rights tool this country has ever had. Yet its press release announcing the bill suggests this is somehow good news for us all. Suspend your disbelief, but apparently “watering down” the Human Rights Act will in some way equate to an “expansion” of the right to freedom of expression. The MoJ cites journalists and their right to protect sources, suggesting this will be a valuable new protection. In fact, just a few months ago the journalist and former MP Chris Mullen relied on the Human Rights Act for precisely this purpose in an important press freedom case.
Sacha Deshmukh is the UK chief executive of Amnesty International
Transport secretary accuses rail union of ‘wasting time and making false claims’
Moderna has announced that it will open a vaccine research and manufacturing centre in the UK. In a visit to mark the announcement, Sajid Javid, the health secretary, said:
We all saw during the pandemic the differences that cutting edge vaccines and treatments can make and we all particularly saw that the mRNA technology has been very transformational. It has literally saved millions of lives over the last couple of years.
And that’s why I’m thrilled to announce this new partnership between the UK government and Moderna, where Moderna will established here in the UK, a global R&D facility with over £1bn for investment in this cutting edge technology, and also a huge manufacturing centre, their largest outside of the US, and so this is a great investment in the UK, and gives huge confidence to our life sciences sector already leading in Europe.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
In today’s newsletter: plans to abolish the Human Rights Act are picking up steam. Archie Bland explains the rights that will be gained – and lost
This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Proposal to abolish Human Rights Act and weaken ECHR is effort to make government ‘untouchable’, say critics
Downing Street will tomorrow set out sweeping plans to override the power of Europe’s human rights court just days after a judge in Strasbourg blocked the deportation of asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda.
The abolition of the Human Rights Act (HRA), including reducing the influence of the European court of human rights (ECHR), will be introduced before parliament in what the government described as a restatement of Britain’s sovereignty.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
This shocking, methodical documentary uses first-hand testimonies to expose a toxic culture where abusers prey on the vulnerable – while hiding behind a cloak of saintliness
Not the United Nations as well. We live resigned to the knowledge that our political parties, law enforcers, independent standards agencies and sport governing bodies are functionally corrupt and deeply chauvinistic. Now Whistleblowers: Inside the UN (BBC Two) is here to tell us that the nearest thing we have to an expression of global conscience is a source of shame as much as hope.
Anyone who has studied the mechanics of the UN security council knows the United Nations is an instrument of iniquitous power, not a check upon it, but Whistleblowers suggests the parts you could still naively have thought of as pure – the collective effort to fight disease, hunger and climate change – ripple with the familiar stench of powerful people who are concerned, it seems, only with how to preserve and abuse their positions. The documentary combines disparate accounts from former senior UN staff, to accumulate a breadth and depth of evidence that becomes crushing.
We start with Emma Reilly, claiming a boss overruled her when she refused to let China see the names of Uyghur activists who were to attend a human rights council meeting. She feared they would be targeted by state repression. One of those activists says his family was targeted.
OK, perhaps that’s just one blase manager, and in any case the programme-makers have been sent a UN statement contesting Reilly’s claim. But then we hear from James Wasserstrom, who says he found evidence that the tendering process for the construction of a power station in Kosovo was compromised by kickbacks, and John O’Brien, who raised concerns that an environmental programme in Russia had succumbed to local money-laundering scams.
Reilly, Wasserstrom and O’Brien all separately allege that once they spoke out, the UN went after them. O’Brien was suddenly accused of solicitation and viewing nude photographs on his phone at work (O’Brien sees the allegations as vexatious). Wasserstrom was promised whistleblower protection, then had his identity leaked to the very people he had accused. Reilly has footage of Swiss police entering her flat and refusing to leave: she says the UN had sent them, and had told them Reilly was a suicide risk. “Effectively,” she recalls, “the UN tried to have me sectioned.” By the time she’d convinced them it was a false alarm, she had missed an online meeting at which she had planned to raise the disclosure of activists’ identities – it so happened that the cops arrived just as the meeting was beginning.
Still, although the trio’s tears seem real, perhaps all three are lying and the UN’s flat denials are the truth. But we are not even halfway into a 90-minute programme that never feels short of material. Next, the journalist Jeremy Dupin relates how he came to suspect that leaking latrines at a UN base in Haiti caused a catastrophic cholera outbreak that began in 2010 and ended up costing more than 10,000 lives. Attempts to hold anyone accountable were stonewalled.
Somehow, after this allegation the programme manages to be shocking in a new way. Because, of course, we’re not talking here about powerful people. We are largely talking about powerful men and, in its latter stages, Whistleblowers switches its focus to an organisational culture of misogyny and rape. We hear how peacekeeping troops in Haiti and Central African Republic were implicated in numerous horrific sexual assaults against vulnerable locals, and we meet one of the victims – as well as the former assistant secretary-general Tony Banbury, who resigned in dismay at the UN’s indifferent response to a child in CAR being raped: “I needed the organisation to prioritise that girl. They prioritised the perpetrators.”
This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Plans to replace the Human Rights Act with a UK-focused alternative will be presented this week
The government will introduce plans for a British bill of rights to parliament on Wednesday. We examine what it will mean in practice.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Letter from 150 organisations adds to MPs’ concern about the bill of rights bypassing pre-legislative process
Dominic Raab is facing demands today from 150 organisations to allow detailed parliamentary scrutiny of legislation that is expected to replace the Human Rights Act.
The justice secretary has been sent a letter coordinated by the campaign group Liberty calling for the bill of rights to be subjected to “robust consideration” amid fears that it will put the government beyond the reach of the law.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Five claimants aged 17-31 want their governments to exit the energy charter treaty, which compensates oil and gas firms
Young victims of the climate crisis will on Tuesday launch legal action at Europe’s top human rights court against an energy treaty that protects fossil fuel investors.
Five people, aged between 17 and 31, who have experienced devastating floods, forest fires and hurricanes are bringing a case to the European court of human rights, where they will argue that their governments’ membership of the little-known energy charter treaty (ECT) is a dangerous obstacle to action on the climate crisis. It is the first time that the Strasbourg court will be asked to consider the treaty, a secretive investor court system that enables fossil fuel companies to sue governments for lost profits.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.