CLA’s policy on criminal justice
All Australians are entitled to protection from arbitrary arrest and unnecessary detention; to a fair, speedy and public trial; to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and to legal advice and representation.
Sentencing should be based on the principle of rehabilitation wherever possible.
Australia’s positioning over Ukraine needs to take many things into consideration, not least of which is the impact (deaths, injuries, lives ruined) on hundreds of thousands of people in the region. While commercial opportunities may emerge from the conflict, globally a change in the balance of power may cost Australia dearly, observes Dr Kay Danes.
Air travel is providing an inisght into how widespread citizen recording and pigeon-holing will become in the very near future, an academic suggests. He warns that thought control is not far behind.
From Canada comes a cautionary tale of how digital trackers – already approved in the USA – can be put inside the body of patients and prisoners in particular to keep them docile and permanently monitored ‘in the cloud’ in real time. Is this happening in Australia: CLA would like to know.
Sue Neill-Fraser has lodged a request for a full appeal hearing to the High Court of Australia…for the second time. The High Court summarily dismissed her request a decade ago, but there is much more reason to believe she deserves to be heard this time, after one of three Tasmanian Criminal Appeal Court judges recently ruled her conviction should be quashed.
A battle over decriminalising some drug use in the ACT is holding back help for desperate people, and probably endangering lives, drug law reform expert Bill Bush says. The outcomes in the ACT are likely a forerunner of changes to drug laws throughout Australia…eventually.
Some 35 official US tough guys, Navy SEALs, have won an interim ruling that they don’t have to obey US Department of Defense orders because they object to vaccination on religious grounds. Will they be demoted down the marine order, and end up as otters…or even ROTTERS.
How would you described Australian Members of Parliament who want Pacific islanders to have more rights and greater decision-making powers than the Australians whom the MPs represent? Hypocrites would be the only world: meet the retiring Kevin Andrews MHR and Minister for the Pacific, Senator Zed Seselja…islander advocates but no lovers of equal democratic rights for all Aussies.
Police Minister’s so-called ‘ring of steel’ is actually giant privacy-invading mechanism, with no public, police or political-legislative safeguards, CLA VP Rajan Venkataraman says. It’s typical of a repressive approach to governing in a state which has no human rights charter to provide a modest baseline against which to measure surveillance intrusion into citizens’ lives.
Wrongful convictions expert Prof Dr Bob Moles has written to Members of the Tasmanian Parliament explaining why they should intervene to ensure justice for Sue Neill-Fraser, the woman convicted – in error, CLA and many liberties, rights and legal experts believe – for killing her husband Bob Chappell, on Australia Day 2009 on board a yacht moored in Sandy Bay, Hobart. The Yacht-No-Body case has riven Tasmania in two, with the state’s Establishment figures and systems fiercely resisting to acknowledge massive errors in the original trial which saw her jailed more than 12 years ago. Read What the Court Got Wrong, and How To Fix the Mess, by Dr Moles and his wife and co-author, Prof Bibi Sangha.
