Mission & Justice

Mike Pflanz; 28/5/08

Sexual abuse of children as young as six by aid workers and United Nations peacekeepers has continued unchecked despite repeated promises to stamp it out, according to a 12-month investigation published yesterday. The study by charity Save the Children UK said there were significant levels of abuse in emergencies, much of it unreported. Unless the silence ended, attempts to stamp out exploitation would “remain fundamentally flawed”. The UN is investigating claims against its soldiers in hotspots such as Haiti, Liberia, Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the report said official UN statistics appeared to underestimate the scale of abuse, probably because so much went unreported.

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Cameron Stewart; 28/5/08

Australian governments would have to embrace “illegal”, “deceptive” and “underhanded” espionage overseas in order to protect the national interest, according to the top-secret reports of the Hope Royal Commission. The reports, released in full yesterday under the 30-year rule, contained blunt calls for more aggressive espionage overseas, warning that failure to do so could compromise vital Australian political, military and economic interests in the region. The reports show that despite Justice Robert Hope’s damning findings on the domestic spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, he was upbeat about the potential of the two foreign spy agencies, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and the eavesdropping agency Defence Signals Directorate. The previously unreleased report relating to ASIS found Australian governments needed to accept that foreign espionage had become vital to the national interest.

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Bonnie Miller Rubin; 10/5/08

The effect of marriage breakdown on children may not be as harmful as once thought. For years, social scientists have believed that children of divorce have had more behaviour problems than those growing up in two-parent homes. But research suggests the impact may not be as damaging as believed. Instead of comparing these youngsters with those from intact families — the usual methodology — a more accurate assessment would be to evaluate them before and after the marital dissolution, says Alan Li, of policy think tank RAND Corp.

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Josh Gordon & Dan Harrison; 27/4/08

Federal taxes on pre-mixed alcoholic drinks were increased without warning at midnight last night by 70% under a Rudd Government plan to fund a new preventive health program and tackle binge-drinking among teenagers, particularly girls. The tax hike — the first for the Labor Government — is expected to raise more than $2 billion in extra revenue over the next four years. A senior Government source last night confirmed that part of the windfall would be used to fund Australia’s largest ever investment in preventive health, focusing on alcohol, smoking, diet and exercise.

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17/4/08

Armed conflicts and violence displaced more than 26 million people within their own countries in 2007, the highest number in more than a decade, an international monitoring body says. And while there is growing international attention to the plight, there has been no breakthrough in reducing their numbers or improving their situation, said specialists from the Norwegian Refugee Council. The council’s internal displacement monitoring centre estimated that the number of such displaced people reached 24.5 million in 2006. But that figure continued to grow in 2007. Last year, the number of displaced people rose sharply in Iraq where there were almost 2.5 million victims by year-end, as well as Congo (1.4 million) and Somalia (1 million).

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Bruce Loudon; 10/2/08

A staggering new statistic on the so-called honour killing of women and girls in Pakistan was revealed yesterday when the country’s top human rights body reported that at least 565 died last year — double the number killed the previous year. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in its annual report that the death toll could in fact be about 1000 — and it added that arrests had been made by investigators in only a derisory 128 cases.

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