Why haven’t the guideline judgment provisions of the Queensland Penalties and Sentencing Act been used by the Premier and the Police Minister to ask the Appeal Court to remedy supposedly soft sentences by Magistrates?
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“Fortunately, Mr Sofronoff found it most unlikely that any innocent people have been wrongly convicted as a result of the lab failures. However, the UK Commission has variously estimated that between two to five percent of the British prison population at any given time are victims of miscarriages of justice. We see no reason why that would not be the case here.”
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“The fact that people who complain that they are the victims of sexual offences are given lifelong anonymity and under the Attorney-General’s proposal people merely accused of such offences will be named shows how the balance between protecting the rights of the accuser and the accused is being so wrongly and unfairly skewed towards the accuser”, Mr O’Gorman said.
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We start from the premise that prisoners including those on probation, parole or other post detention supervised release, do not have the same privacy rights as ordinary citizens, but they are not stripped of their entire right to privacy
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In our view in a noisy environment like a modern city, effective communication must involve speakers being able to amplify their voices within clear limits that respect the rights of other users of the space.
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“The traditional requirement that before a search can proceed there must be a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed or a weapon found is a bulwark protection of our liberty. Such a requirement is essential to being able to prevent arbitrary searches or searches based on bias. The granting of such powers will inevitably result in unwarranted invasions of privacy.”
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The Council maintains its position that the advancement of women’s equality and protecting them from violence cannot come at the expense of fundamental legal principles and arrangements designed to protect the liberty of everyone
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Every Australian has a right to freedom of speech and freedom of protest. It is the tactic of authoritarian regimes the world over to have armed police officers visit a person’s home to attempt to dissuade them from exercising their legitimate right to freedom of speech and freedom of protest.
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“It is absolutely vital that this Commission is not given an unrestrained roving commission to enforce vague notions of integrity” said Mr Cope
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Civil libertarians have traditionally been very sceptical about the creation of standing Royal Commissions such as this. And in our view, there have been examples of cases in which the State Commissions have abused their powers. So it is perhaps with some reluctance that we accept the necessity of this body. Accepting that there is a need for this body it is absolutely vital that it is not given an unrestrained roving commission to enforce vague notions of integrity.
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It is to be hoped that the Inquiry in reporting on the police discipline term of reference will recommend a top to bottom thorough and fundamental change to a seriously flawed Queensland Police discipline system”, Mr O’Gorman said.
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Mr O’Gorman posed the question does this mean that no practising Catholic can ever be a CEO of Essendon or any other football codes or clubs who have approved or have been silent on the circumstances of Mr Thorburn’s departure from Essendon
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“To change the double jeopardy law to get the State Government out of a political problem of its own making must be fought robustly and vigorously”, Mr OGorman said.
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In 2001 and 2005 the Federal and State Parliaments passed laws designed to deal with terrorism. Most of those laws were subject to sunset clauses. Over 20 years later those laws remain in place, with the sunset period being regularly extended with very little debate. The liberty undermining principles contained in those laws have now been extended into numerous other areas of the criminal law, as we predicted they would. We do not wish the continuing existence of these powers to be used as justification for the micromanagement of people’s lives in other areas.
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A number of underlying and systemic factors contribute to the often-uncomfortable necessity to partake in begging, public drunkenness and public urination. These factors should be addressed with a health-focused response and increased social support rather than relying on the criminal justice system. Punitive measures have not, and will not, effectively end the behaviours described, but will only serve to further entrench prejudice and discrimination on the basis of race and class.
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what seems right is to use law to protect the bodily safety of prostitutes from assault, to protect their rights to their incomes against the extortionate behaviour of pimps, to protect poor women in developing countries from forced trafficking and fraudulent offers, and to guarantee their full civil rights in the countries where they end up—to make them, in general, equals under the law, both civil and criminal….But the criminalisation of prostitution seems to pose a major obstacle to that equality
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“Faulty science has been one of the leading causes of miscarriages of justice in Queensland and throughout Australia for decades going back to the infamous Lindy Chamberlain monumental forensic scientific failure in the 1980s,” Mr Cope said.
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The expenditure cap for third parties should strike a fair balance between respect for freedom of speech and association, and the importance of preventing third parties exercising disproportionate influence in elections and being used to circumvent expenditure caps. The current proposal is that each third party can spend the same amount as all the mayoral candidate caps combined. This is absurd. This system permits every third party the same influence, in expenditure terms, as all the mayoral candidates combined. It is hard to see how this system would not inevitably lead to the exact outcome the system purports to be trying to avoid – that being the complete drowning out of other election participants’ voices.
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