1,721,025 research outputs found
Missing the boat on asylum
No full textAustralia should make a bigger commitment to resettling refugees, writes Jane McAdam in the National Times
ACCORDING to the Prime Minister, the government\u27s new asylum policy is a response to people\u27s concerns about border security. She says such concerns are not about racism or xenophobia. But they are, largely, about ignorance fuelled by the dismal political debate about refugees, with tabloid media sensationalism stoking the fire.
The government\u27s proposal to create a \u27\u27regional processing centre\u27\u27 in East Timor sounds like the new \u27\u27Pacific solution\u27\u27. In fact, it is a reworking of a failed proposal by the British government in 2003 to create \u27\u27transit processing centres\u27\u27 outside the European Union. That drew its inspiration from the \u27\u27Pacific solution\u27\u27.
Criticism by other EU states meant the proposal never got off the ground, not least because it raised…
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Jane McAdam, Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law (Book review)
Get PDFThis book explores the issue of environmentally-induced migrations from the point of view of international human rights law, international humanitarian law, international refugee law and international law of statelessness. Last few years have become a period of unprecedented growth in the number of studies devoted to the forced migration caused by climate change. The book by professor Jane McAdam, published by Oxford University Press, differs significantly from previous studies in this area. The focus of the author became a state responsibility for the situation of climate-change induced displaced people with a particular focus on legal aspects of this problem. The basis of the author`s considerations are four particular areas of public international law: international human rights law, international humanitarian law, international refugee law and international law of statelessness. The issue of climate change-induced displacement is now becoming a growing challenge for public international law. The growing number of climate change migrants becomes a challenge for the international istitutions dealing with humanitarian assistance. Sea level rise become a factor of specific legal problems, such as climatic deterritorialization of the state, state succession on the new territory, the status of people forced to leave their country submerged under the waters of ocean (forced migrants?, refugees?, stateless people?, citizens of the former country continuing its status within a new territory?)
How Australia protects war criminals but not asylum seekers from torture
No full textAustralia has been selective in implementing its international obligations, according to Jane McAdam
THIS week’s revelations about suspected war criminals living in the Australian community highlights Australia’s contradictory implementation of international law. Although Australia refuses to extradite convicted and suspected criminals to countries where they may be tortured, asylum seekers are not afforded the same protection. The risk of torture is an automatic consideration in any extradition request, but Australian law contains no mechanism that guarantees the examination of torture fears in asylum claims.
Australia’s refugee protection regime has already been much criticised for its failure to implement Australia’s international obligations in good faith, in accordance with the spirit and purpose of the 1951 Refugee Convention. But since the conclusion of that treaty, there has been an explosion of additional human rights treaties that extend countries’ obligations to protect vulnerable individuals.
The Convention against Torture, for example, mandates that no one will be returned to a country when there are substantial grounds for believing that they will be tortured. Whereas certain persons, such as war criminals, may be excluded from protection under article 1F of the Refugee Convention, the prohibition on return to torture is absolute. It applies to all persons, regardless of their conduct, nationality or citizenship. Accordingly, it may protect those who are excluded from the Refugee Convention, those unable to demonstrate a link between torture as persecution and one of the five Refugee Convention grounds, and those overlooked as refugees due to narrow domestic interpretations of the refugee definition.
Although this international obligation is a feature of Australian extradition law, it is notably absent from our refugee protection regime.
Under Australian law, an individual cannot claim refugee status solely on the basis of fearing torture, even though Australia is bound under international law not to remove anyone to a country where torture may ensue. The only hope for such a person is to seek asylum under the Refugee Convention, fail in that claim, appeal unsuccessfully to the Refugee Review Tribunal, and then attempt to invoke the minister’s non-compellable and non-reviewable discretion under section 417 of the Migration Act. This haphazard and circuitous procedure does not guarantee that the torture claim will ever be considered.
If Australia removes an individual in those circumstances, it will be in clear breach of its international duties. Recognising this, Canada, the United States and all countries of the European Union enable protection claims to be brought on the basis of fear of torture, as well as fear of inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and various other grounds. This is known as ‘complementary protection’. The absence of any system of complementary protection in Australia reflects Australia’s failure to adequately implement the obligations which it has voluntarily accepted under international law.
In the extradition context, however, Australia has legislated against removal to torture. If Australia is asked to extradite an individual who has been convicted or charged with a criminal offence for which punishment is at least twelve months, extradition cannot proceed unless the Attorney-General is satisfied that the person will not be subjected to torture on surrender to the extradition country. Thus, suspected or convicted criminals have the protection of domestic legal and procedural safeguards, in accordance with international law, while asylum seekers do not.
There is a clear disconnect between Australia’s domestic protection and extradition requirements. Under international law, Australia owes the same obligations to all individuals, whether they are victims of persecutory regimes or perpetrators of it. If Australia refuses to remove suspected or convicted criminals to countries in which they may be tortured, there is no legal, political or moral justification for refusing to extend the same safeguards to asylum seekers in need of protection - who are, after all, asserting a basis for protection which Australia’s international law commitments require it to respect. •
Jane McAdam is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney and an associate of the Sydney Centre for International and Global Law.
Photo: Andrew Jeffre
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
We aren't refugees
No full textFor people on Kiribati and Tuvalu, the description "refugee" has too many negative connotations, write Jane McAdam and Maryanne Loughry on our partner website, INSIDE STOR
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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