The Human Rights Law Centre works with international NGOs to highlight the human rights challenges presented by COVID-19 globally and to ensure that UN human rights mechanisms, such as Human Rights Council and Special Procedures, can support countries like Australia in implementing human rights based responses to COVID-19, and hold them to account when they fail to do so.

Kids should not be in prisons, and they definitely should not be in prisons right now.

Last year, Philanthropy Australia held its Philanthropy Meets Parliament Summit where ideas about the state of our democracy were debated, tested and challenged. Continuing that debate in to 2020, Hugh de Kretser, Executive Director of the Human Rights Law Centre, highlights how important charity advocacy is for a healthy democracy.

Some politicians seem to spend more time with their mates in the corporate box than with voters. The Palaszczuk Government is proposing laws to change this. But donation caps will hurt grassroots advocacy and charities the most, and lets corporations off the hook.

Two men, lawyer Bernard Collaery and his client, known as Witness K, now face jail time for blowing the whistle on a disgraceful chapter in Australian intelligence history. The episode highlights the need for stronger whistleblower protections in Australia.

This month marked two important anniversaries for our region, but one is likely to go largely unmentioned in Australia. 

The Australian Government has a duty of care to provide proper healthcare to the people it has held offshore on Nauru and Manus for six long years. Before the Medevac laws, it is clear that the Government was failing in its duty.

Backbencher Andrew Hastie is chairing a powerful parliamentary committee that is looking into laws that criminalise whistleblowing and journalism. It's ironic, because his opinion piece for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald last week is a perfect example of what is wrong with these laws.

Social security is a vital safety net that most people in Australia will turn to at some point in their lives. In this context, the 2019 federal election offered two very different futures for remote communities in the Northern Territory.

Today marks an awful milestone. It is six years since then prime minister Kevin Rudd announced that anyone arriving in Australia by boat seeking safety would be deported to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

Prisons are fundamentally at odds with the notion of rehabilitation. On the brink of tears, a 19-year-old locked up in Port Phillip Prison recently asked me: "How can I think about tomorrow when I can barely survive today?"

This week saw a big win for women's rights in Australia in the High Court. It is an historic step forward in the long journey for reproductive freedom for women in Australia. It's also a timely reminder of how far we have to go.