Human Rights

A human rights group is continuing its fight for the release of Australians held in a Syrian refugee camp, bringing its case for a writ of habeas corpus to the High Court.

The lead applicants are seeking to drop a class action against the Northern Territory government over its alleged failure to properly fund essential health services and interpreting services in remote Indigenous communities.

The Tasmanian government has agreed to settle a class action on behalf of former child detainees of the state’s Ashley Youth Detention Centre alleging decades of systemic negligence by management.

The lead applicant in a class action over the alleged unlawful detention of 240 Indonesian children and the Commonwealth are locked in a battle over the construction of a $27.5 million settlement reached last year.

The Full Federal Court has dismissed an appeal by human rights group Save the Children, which sought to bring home Australians stuck in Syrian camps, rejecting as “mere conjecture” claims that Home Affairs had a repatriation arrangement with an authority in Syria.

A class action over the Victorian government’s decision to retire Melbourne’s high rise public housing towers has agreed to drop claims against the state of Victoria and the minister for housing after a judge threw out the claims but allowed the class action to replead.

The Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal has ruled that social media giant X must face a human rights complaint brought by a Muslim advocacy group over allegedly dehumanising material on the site.

The Northern Territory public housing authority has moved to throw out a class action’s claims that it engaged in racial discrimination by failing to maintain public housing in remote Aboriginal communities. 

One Nation senator Pauline Hanson has been accused of lying under oath after claiming she did not know deputy Greens leader Mehreen Faruqi was Muslim when she wrote in a a tweet that the senator should “piss off back to Pakistan”. 

A judge has rejected a bid to keep the settlement sum under wraps in a class action against Nine over its coverage of litigation related to the 2004 Palm Island riots, noting that a “ballpark” figure is already open to be deduced from the settlement deed.