The death penalty is a form of punishment that has been condemned internationally. Many see it as an abuse of human rights with activists waging a decades long war against governments to see it eradicated from society. Many executions have involved prisoners with severe mental health conditions. Criminal justice systems around the world have stigmatised...Read More

John Baker’s story of the collection of wines that once belonged to Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, and was controlled by and supplemented by Joseph Stalin, the Soviet strong man who ran Russia from 1924 to his death in 1953, took a long time in the telling. The earliest scenes, in which John...Read More

In Helmbright v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs (No 3) [2021] FCA 955, Mortimer J ordered each party bear its own costs of proceedings in which a New Zealand citizen of Australian Aboriginal descent unsuccessfully sought a declaration that he was not an alien for the purposes of section 51(xix) of...Read More

In 2015 the Abbott government established what it said was a fast-track asylum seeker process to deal with around 30,000 individuals from Afghanistan and other countries and who were not detained in offshore facilities like Manus Island and Nauru. It is called the Independent Assessment Authority (IAA) and its role is to deal with cases...Read More

Justice Bromberg of the Federal Court today delivered a stunning decision that blows open the duty of care for climate change in Australia. The decision, Sharma v Minister for the Environment [2021] FCA 560, will reverberate for many years to come. The case was brought by a group of eight brave children led by Anjali...Read More

Facts/Background The High Court delivered orders in Palmer v Western Australia [2021] HCA 5 (‘Palmer’) on 6 November 2020. The highly anticipated reasons for that decision were published 24 February 2021. The court considered whether the Quarantine (Closing the Border) Directions (WA) and/or the authorising legislation were invalid because they impermissibly infringed s 92 of...Read More

ICJ Queensland is hosting a free webinar on 22 April 2021 at 5.30pm (AEST / GMT+10) on watershed UK decisions holding parent companies potentially liable for harm caused by their subsidiary companies under normal principles for establishing a duty of care. The UK approach contrasts with Australia where parent company liability has largely fallen off...Read More

Background The High Court’s recent decision in Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs v AAM17 [2021] HCA 6 concerned issues of procedural fairness in the delivery of reasons for judgment in Federal Circuit Court proceedings in the migration law context. The first respondent, a citizen of Pakistan, was refused a Protection (Class...Read More

The decision in Okpabi v Royal Dutch Shell [2021] UKSC 3 (Shell) reads like a bomb that has just exploded in the boardrooms of multinational companies globally. In it, the UK Supreme Court confirmed its watershed decision in Vedanta Resources PLC v Lungowe [2019] UKSC 20, (Vedanta) that: “‘the liability of parent companies in relation...Read More

In Oakley Coal Action Alliance Inc v New Acland Coal Pty Ltd & Ors [2021] HCA 2 the High Court allowed an appeal against a decision of the Queensland the Court of Appeal that had declined to set aside and remit for rehearing an administrative decision of the Land Court of Queensland found to be...Read More