Mission & Justice

Natasha Wallace; 23/9/08

When her 16-month-old daughter was rushed to hospital in respiratory distress, Leigh Burness-Cowan, a lesbian mum, had no authority over her treatment. Ms Burness-Cowan, 34, a high school maths teacher, is also allowed to pick up Hunter, now three, from preschool only with the permission of the birth mother, her partner, Kendi Burness-Cowan. The Merrylands couple are among about 1000 NSW families granted equal legal rights under new laws which came into effect yesterday and allow the names of both lesbian mothers on birth certificates. The Burness-Cowans are on a waiting list of about 100 families who have inquired about new certificates.

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Kim Gamel; 22/9/08

Boys and girls in navy blue and white uniforms giggled and held hands Sunday as they filed into dusty and often rundown classrooms for the first day of school in Iraq. Parents and their children were hopeful that recent security gains would allow them to focus on studies after years of violence that has forced education to the sidelines. “I’m happy that classes are starting today and pray to God that everything will be fine this year,” said 10-year-old Haider Mustafa, wearing a backpack as his dad dropped him off at a school in Baghdad’s mainly Shiite neighbourhood of Karradah. “I hope that we have security this year that will let us study normally.” Not everybody was ready to start school. Many parents decided to wait to send their children until after the fasting month of Ramadan, which ends in early October.

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Shlomo Shamir; 22/9/08

A group of Iranian organizations working in the U.S. is preparing to stage a rally against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ahead of the Iranian President’s visit to New York on Monday for the United Nations General Assembly. The Iranian activists, some of them known as human rights activists, are organizing a mass demonstration on Tuesday, titled “Ahmadinejad, why are you executing children?” Within the framework of the rally, to be held in the plaza adjacent to the United Nations building in New York, organizers plan to erect a “wall of shame” which will include a series of pictures and documented proof of Iran’s abuse of jailed minors.

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Caroline Overington; 16/9/08

A mother of seven has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of her four-year-old son, who for religious reasons was given no medical care for two years, despite being blind, unable to stand and forced to slither “like a snake” around the room. Paramedics found the child gaunt, with sunken milky eyes, and wrapped in a blanket in the family’s four-storey, four-bedroom home in August 2003. The boy’s mother told police none of her children had ever had medical treatment and she had never had medical treatment. If somebody in the family was sick, she would “say a little prayer”. She agreed that her son had never walked or crawled, “just slithered across like a snake”.

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Natasha Robinson; 13/9/08

Northern Territory school students have slipped behind the rest of the nation’s children in reading, writing and numeracy, with a third of children in Years 3, 5 and 7 failing to meet the national benchmark for reading. The first nationally compared literacy and numeracy results confirm the extent of the crisis in indigenous education in the Territory. They show that the Territory is producing fewer numbers of high-achieving students than other states. The National Assessment Program summary report, released yesterday, reveals that 36per cent of Territory students in Year 5 failed to achieve the nationally accepted minimum level of achievement in reading, and 33 per cent of Year 5 students did not reach the national benchmark for writing.

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11/9/08

Five countries, led by Iran, account for all executions of children in the world, Human Rights Watch said, urging an end to the practice. Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen are the only countries that continue to impose the death penalty on people younger than 18 when they committed a crime. The United States outlawed execution of juvenile offenders in 2005. The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged the United Nations, which holds its annual General Assembly next week, to pressure for greater protections for children. “We are only five states away from a complete ban on the juvenile death penalty,” HRW spokeswoman Clarisa Bencomo said.

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Jamie Walker; 1/9/09

Harrowing new accounts of children suffering in mandatory detention have triggered calls for a royal commission into Australia’s immigration enforcement system. A new book, Human Rights Overboard, promises to reopen old wounds - even though Kevin Rudd has guaranteed that children will never again be held in immigration detention. Using the first-hand accounts of former child detainees and their parents, the book details the impact of mandatory detention on boatpeople and other unlawful entrants before the policy was watered down. A boy, 3, was so unhappy that he “executed” his toy truck with a length of string. “He said to his mother, ‘I have killed my truck because it is tired of being sad’,” according to one witness’s account.

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Nurit Wurgaft; 1/9/08

The murder of a child almost always makes the entire country skip a heartbeat, especially if news of the death is preceded by the child’s disappearance and extensive searches. During the past 30 years dozens of children have disappeared or been murdered in Israel. Many of these cases remain unsolved to this day.

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30/8/08

Poorer women are now less likely to breastfeed than they were a decade ago, increasing the chance of their babies becoming ill and being hospitalised, a new study shows. A large-scale review of national health surveys has revealed no change in the number of mothers overall who breastfed their babies in the past decade. But the Melbourne researchers behind the study in the Medical Journal of Australia say the broad figures mask an increasing divide between the richest and the poorest Australians. Infants in the highest socio-economic group are more likely to be breastfed than in previous years, with a rise from 53 to 66 per cent between 1995 and 2005.

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Matt Wade; 30/8/08

Despite a wave of scandals, child-trafficking remains a huge problem for India, reports in Chennai. Charities are normally keen to get some publicity to raise their profile and help with fund-raising. But that’s not the case for orphanages and adoption agencies in Chennai, India’s fourth biggest city. They have closed ranks after years of negative stories about an adoption “scam” at a local orphanage called Malaysian Social Services.

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