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It is with great pleasure that I present my second Native Title Report as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner. I launched my first Report, the Native Title Report 2010 in February 2011. These reports are produced each year in accordance with the requirement under the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) (Native Title Act) for me to report annually on the impact of the…

The Face the Facts education resource is designed to complement the material in the Commission's Face the Facts publication. First published in 1997, Face the Facts reflects the continued demand for accurate and easy to understand information about Indigenous peoples, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

Focused age assessment interviews can be a useful technique for assessing age. Interviews of this kind have been used in Australia in a range of different ways since late 2010.

As my predecessor pointed out in the Native Title Report 2003, native title is a political process as well as a legal process. Indigenous people enter a relationship with the State on the basis of their identity as the traditional owner group of an area of land. In some cases native title has provided the first opportunity since colonisation for a relationship of this type to be formed.

The year under review in this, my fourth Native Title Report, is a year in which the High Court has handed down its decision in several significant native title cases thus elucidating the principles upon which the recognition and extinguishment of native title are determined. 2002 marks the end of a ten year period since the Mabo decision [1] first introduced the dual concepts of recognising and…

This is my sixth, and final, Social Justice Report as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner. It covers the period from 1 July 2008 to 30 June 2009.

The position of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner was established within the Australian Human Rights Commission in 1993 to carry out the following functions:

The landscape of the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) is under severe ecological stress. Issues such as salinity, poor water quality, stressed forests, dried wetlands, threatened native species, feral animals and noxious weeds are commonplace within the MDB. The reasons for this dramatic decline in river health are caused by water mismanagement including reversal of natural flow cycles and over…

Over the past year increasing trends of prejudice and harassment of particular groups in our community has continued to be an area of significant concern for me. As noted in the 2002-03 annual report, I launched the Isma project in March 2003 in response to increasing concerns expressed by Arab and Muslim organisations about the rise in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice in Australia.

The National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention refers to the adequacy and appropriateness of Australia’s treatment of child asylum seekers and other children who are, or have been, held in immigration detention, including:

In recent years there have been significant developments at the international level that impact upon the recognition and protection of the human rights of indigenous peoples. Most notably, there have been: i) reforms to the machinery of the United Nations (UN) and the emphasis given to human rights within that system; ii) the making of global commitments to action, through the Millennium…

We have also played an important leadership role internationally by sharing our experience with other national human rights institutions and by contributing technical assistance to advance partnerships for human rights in other countries.