Change the Record and the Human Rights Law Centre strongly condemn the Crisafulli Government for ramming through laws to lock up even more children in Queensland’s overcrowded and unsafe police watch houses and youth prisons. The laws will disproportionately imprison Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, and children with disabilities.

Communities living with the ongoing devastation from Rio Tinto’s former Panguna mine in Bougainville are calling on the company to commit to funding remediation and addressing public safety risks, after a major independent investigation funded by the company confirmed life-threatening, ongoing social, environmental and human rights impacts from the mine.

Governments across Australia are being urged to enact comprehensive legislation to stop corporations, wealthy individuals and governments misusing Australia’s legal system, in a new report released by the Human Rights Law Centre today. 

Civil society groups and unions have welcomed proposed changes to strengthen Australia’s modern slavery law, including through the  introduction of penalties, but are calling on the Albanese Government to also introduce a legal requirement for companies to take action to prevent modern slavery.

The Human Rights Law Centre is calling for the Albanese Government to widen reforms to address the growing threat of hate speech, discrimination and vilification.

The Human Rights Law Centre and refugee advocates have criticised the Albanese Government’s cruel attacks on migrant and refugee communities, after some of the most brutal migration laws Australia has seen in years were passed overnight.

Change the Record and the Human Rights Law Centre have denounced the Crisafulli Government’s gob-smacking laws that will mean ten-year-old children will face adult sentences and grow up in prison cells. The shameful changes will further exacerbate the overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in watch houses and prisons. 

Human rights, unions and civil society groups are calling on the Albanese Government to take stronger action on modern slavery, after the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery sounded the alarm in a report released today.    

The Human Rights Law Centre has called for urgent reform to whistleblowing and secrecy laws, following the Albanese Government’s largely-positive response to an independent review of Australia’s general secrecy regime, accepting recommendations which will better protect whistleblowers and journalists. 

The Human Rights Law Centre is calling for the abolition of the Form 1 “protest permit” system after NSW Police arrested 170 people peacefully protesting the world’s largest coal port at Rising Tide in Newcastle over the weekend. 

The Human Rights Law Centre is urging Parliament not to pass the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2004, which would ban people under the age of 16 from using social media.

The Human Rights Law Centre will call for the Albanese Government to abandon its brutal deportation and surveillance laws, in evidence to a Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee inquiry this evening.