Until 2013, Australian state and territory laws allowed forcing people into psychiatric treatment if it was thought necessary to protect them from serious harm – even if they competently refused it.
To understand Rodrigo Duterte’s rise to power and the public support for killing drug dealers and users, we need to distinguish the empirical from the normative – the ‘what is’ from ‘what should be’.
Does including torture or other human rights violations in video games trivialize the actions? Or might it force us to think more critically about them?
The main criticism leveled at the body that oversees the work of South Africa’s elite police unit, the Hawks, is that it lacks the power to initiate investigations, making it ineffective.
It has taken more than three months for the Australian and PNG governments to jointly announce the Manus Island detention centre will close. But the detainees’ fate is now even more uncertain.
Reports of abuse on Nauru should provide a flashpoint for the Turnbull government to reassess its asylum-seeker policies before more serious harm is inflicted on Australia’s international standing.
Ukraine desperately needs Chinese investment but, like many other countries in this position, this is giving rise to concerns about the consequences for its fragile democracy.
Leaked incident reports from the Nauru detention centre affirm what has been known for a long time: detention is no place for children, and we need alternatives to offshore processing.
Legislating against racial and religious vilification is highly fraught, as the ongoing debate around Section 18C has demonstrated, and unlikely to become less so any time soon.