Keywords: Torture
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Bill Calcutt
- 09 August 2013
1 Comment
Since the turn of the millennium several major technology-enabled developments have significantly altered the balance between national security and civil liberties. In Australia, the hyper-politicisation of national security finds voice in the discourse on the issue of border security, turning a complex humanitarian and policing challenge (asylum seekers arriving by sea) into an enormously controversial and expensive imbroglio.
READ MORE 
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Ellena Savage
- 02 August 2013
1 Comment
Even more disturbing than PNG's poverty and gender-based violence is its military and police human rights record. Evidence of abuses in the form of a military blockade, massacres, rape and torture during the Bougainville Crisis of the 1990s are well-documented. The history of this crisis reveals PNG as incapable of caring for its most vulnerable citizens due to systemic corruption.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
We will now tell damaged, fearful people who try to come here: Go to PNG. Wait in fever-ridden tent camps for years to be processed. We have used our economic power over a small impoverished and fairly unstable country to say to its political class: we will bribe your country to accept as future citizens groups of people who have no affinity with or respect for you, and for whom you have no affinity or respect.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 17 July 2013
23 Comments
Knowing I was going to spend six months in Greece, I arranged for a trunk of books to be sent over. My illiterate mother-in-law was stupefied: 'So many books! Can't you sell some of them?' I should have known she'd react like this, as during her one visit to Melbourne she'd told me roundly that too much reading was the cause of my prematurely grey hair and my need to wear glasses.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 15 July 2013
6 Comments
Sean Faircloth, a US director of one of the Dawkins Institutes committed to atheism, raised what has already become a hoary old chestnut, the failure of Francis when in Argentina during the Dirty Wars to adequately defend his fellow Jesuits who were detained and tortured by unscrupulous soldiers. Being a Jesuit, I thought I was peculiarly well situated to respond. I confess to having got a little carried away.
READ MORE
-
INTERNATIONAL
Rudd's visit to Jakarta this week will be judged on the outcome of asylum seeker discussions. But he needs also to send a clear message about Australia's hopes for next year's presidential elections. Candidates include a former military commander with a dubious human rights record, and a civilian being described as Indonesia's Obama.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 20 June 2013
During a lecture at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, biologist Geoff Burton speaks of the agonising genetic disorder that claimed the life of his infant son. He insists that his subsequent research into prenatal diagnosis and treatment is not related to eugenics. But merely naming the slippery slope doesn't negate it.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Susan Adams, Peta Edmonds and Lyn McCredden
- 18 June 2013
3 Comments
A man swims back to you like a friendly dog. Asks you for spare change. He hasn't eaten since Thursday and it's Sunday now in the city. You empty your wallet of all its coins. $2.70. The city is heavenly, full of karma. A kid with a snake tattooed on his wrist gives you two cigarettes.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Ellena Savage
- 07 June 2013
10 Comments
This past fortnight, race has been high on the agenda. Can a 13-year-old be racist? Is what Eddie McGuire said racist? Meanwhile, revelations that police officers in one Melbourne suburb had printed and distributed 50 racist stubby holders hinted at a frightening culture of racialised violence. The reality is that racial violence is inextricable from racist language.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
The weather seemed to express the mood of this city of international public servants paid to resolve the world's problem. Over dinner we discussed health and human rights for remote rural communities in the poorest corners of the world. That's Geneva: clean, ordered, pretty, earnest, and struggling to make the world in its image.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Donna Mulhearn
- 20 March 2013
9 Comments
I sat with my Iraqi friend in his photo store. I was his last customer, he said; the bombs would begin tomorrow. And then he began to weep. I remember thinking that his life, and the lives of others like him, would not be given a second's thought once the invasion started. The next day, the bombs began.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Michael Mullins
- 04 March 2013
22 Comments
Opposition Immigration spokesperson Scott Morrison called for a suspension of asylum seekers being released into the community, on the basis of a single violent incident. Fairfax Media showed these people are about 45 times less likely to be charged with a crime than members of the public. A fear mongering politician appears to have more credibility than the facts.
READ MORE