The Human Rights Law Centre is calling on the Albanese Government to strengthen our modern slavery laws. Our laws need requirements on companies to take action to address modern slavery, and penalties for those that do not. We are advocating for independent oversight through a new Anti-Slavery Commissioner.
Read MoreThe Human Rights Law Centre is supporting communities in Bougainville to compel Rio Tinto to fund solutions to the environmental and human rights impacts of its former Panguna mine.
Read MoreFrom Malaysian workers forced to work around the clock to make PPE, to migrant workers trapped in shocking conditions on Australian farms, many companies continue to turn a blind eye to exploitation and abuse in their supply chains. Our team advocates for stronger laws to end modern slavery.
Read MoreThe Human Rights Law Centre and Maurice Blackburn are supporting the Berati family in legal action to hold the Australian Government and G4S to account for Reza Berati’s murder at a Manus Island detention centre in 2014
Read MoreThis report from the Migrant Justice Institute and the Human Rights Law Centre proposes new whistleblower protections to enable migrant workers to address exploitation.
Read MoreBroken Promises: Two years of corporate reporting under Australia’s Modern Slavery Act examines the second year of corporate statements submitted to the Government's Modern Slavery Register by 92 companies sourcing from four sectors with known risks of modern slavery: garments from China, rubber gloves from Malaysia, seafood from Thailand and fresh produce from Australia.
Read MoreA new report by the Melbourne Social Equity Institute and Human Rights Law Centre, Labour in Limbo: Bridging Visa E holders and Modern Slavery Risk in Australia, casts a new light on the continued suffering of people who sought safety in Australia by boat.
Read MoreThe recent change of government in Australia represents a much-needed opportunity to revitalise Australia’s approach to corporate respect for human rights, including to reorientate the Modern Slavery Act by requiring companies to undertake effective human rights due diligence aimed at preventing harm.
Read MoreA new report, Paper Promises? Evaluating the early impact of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act, examines statements submitted to the Government's Modern Slavery Register by 102 companies sourcing from four sectors with known risks of modern slavery: garments from China, rubber gloves from Malaysia, seafood from Thailand and fresh produce from Australia.
Read MoreMining giant Rio Tinto is responsible for multiple human rights violations caused by pollution from its former mine in Bougainville. For 45 years, the Panguna copper and gold mine on the island of Bougainville was majority-owned by the British-Australian mining company, but in 2016 Rio Tinto divested from the mine, leaving behind more than a billion tonnes of mine waste.
Read MoreThis report shines a spotlight on ten cases of human rights violations involving Australian multinationals. The cases cut across countries and industries, from ANZ’s involvement in financing land grabs in Cambodia to BHP’s role in the Samarco dam disaster in Brazil and Broadspectrum and Wilson Security’s responsibility for alleged sexual assaults on refugee women and children held in offshore detention on Nauru.
Read MoreRana Plaza is often described as the garment industry’s “worst industrial accident”, but the industry practices that led to it were far from accidental writes Keren Adams.
Read MoreIf you are reading this on your computer, phone or tablet, chances are it was made in China by a worker like 18-year-old Xiao Ya.
Xiao left her home town in rural China to find work to help support her ageing parents. She got a job cleaning tablet screens in Guangzhou, in one of the big factories which produce 90 per cent of the world's electronics.
Read MoreAustralia’s offshore camps are a house of cards. They’re unsustainable and liable to collapse amid increasing corporate aversion to complicity in abuse, legal uncertainty and human despair.
Read MoreEvery day that the Manus Island and Nauru camps stay open, people suffer. Every day that Ferrovial operates those centres, it is exposed to risk, writes the HRLC's Rachel Ball.
Read MoreOf the myriad issues inadequately covered in the 2010 Federal Election campaign, the issues as to Australian values and identity, and how these values shape the way we understand our role and responsibility in the world, must figure high. In the leaders' debate, for example, the only discussion of Australian foreign policy and our place in the world arose in the context of the 'Timor Solution' and the war in Afghanistan. This is not the way things should be. With real leadership, elections present an opportunity to tap into admirable but often latent aspects of national identity, a concept explored by Canadian political scientist Alison Brysk in her new book, Global Good Samaritans: Human Rights as Foreign Policy.
Read MoreGoogle’s recent announcement that it will not tolerate censorship of its search engine in China raises significant issues as to the relationship of business and human rights; a relationship in which regulation has not kept pace with practice or public expectations. In his landmark 2008 report the UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights, Harvard professor John Ruggie, noted that the globalisation of business activity has not been matched by a globalisation of business regulation.
Read MoreThe Australian ‘reluctance about rights’ and the gap between international human rights law and Australian domestic law, policy and practice are well documented. Despite ratifying all of the major international human rights treaties, Australia has not fully implemented or incorporated their provisions into domestic law. Australia remains the only Western democracy without a legislatively or constitutionally enshrined charter of human rights.
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