Criminology Seminars
Location: PSI Library (Level 10) Menzies Building, Monash University Clayton Campus
| Date | Time | Seminar |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday 18 March |
1-2 pm | Tamar Hopkins Victorian Law Foundation Community Legal Centre Fellow, Honorary Fellow Monash University 'Police Complaints Mechanisms' Australian law enforcement integrity agencies tend to focus their efforts on corruption to the exclusion of human rights breaches. While accepting a bribe or dealing in drugs is clearly misconduct by police, these are not human rights breaches. A focus on corruption ignores the real and daily abuses experienced by everyday people and in particular, marginalised groups in our society. Victoria now has a Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities 2006 (“the Charter”). Victoria Police has publicly announced its commitment to uphold the rights in this Charter. One of the roles Office of Police Integrity (“the OPI”) is to ensure that Victoria Police have regard to the rights in the Charter. After recording repeated human rights breaches reported by people in the Flemington region and witnessing the failure of Victoria’s police complaint system to provide individual remedies for abuses of this nature I was motivated to look outside Australia to countries that may have a more effective way of responding to allegations of human rights abuses by police. The question I am exploring is what would a human rights centred and compliant response to an allegation of a human rights violation by police look like and what would it mean in practice for agencies receiving allegations of these human rights abuses.
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| Wednesday 22 April |
1-2 pm | Dr Leanne Weber and A/Prof Sharon Pickering
'Border Autopsy: misadventure or death by policy?' In what is often described as a 'world in motion', western governments are investing enormous resources in border controls aimed at immobilising unwanted or suspect populations. These measures range from visa controls to offshore interception regimes, physical barricades and military patrols. As a result, thousands of men, women and children have drowned while attempting perilous sea voyages to Europe; the US-Mexico border has claimed far more lives than the Berlin Wall; and many unanswered questions remain about the role of Australian border authorities in the sinking of the so-called Siev-X off the coast of Java in October 2001. Still, the human consequences of border control policies remain largely invisible to the populations of developed nations, and are received with widespread indifference when they do come to notice. In October this year, Croatian police announced, incorrectly as we now know, that a body recovered from the Adriatic Sea was not the remains of missing Australian backpacker Britt Lapthorne, explaining that it was 'not unusual' to find bodies of irregular migrants who had failed to reach Italy by sea from neighbouring Albania and Montenegro. In this paper we will outline the deadly consequences of contemporary border controls, consider possible explanations for the widespread indifference to this mounting death toll, and contemplate the possibility of a less border-conscious future.
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| Wednesday 13 May |
1-2 pm | Dr Marie Segrave
'Exploitation & entrepreneurs: temporary migrant labour in regional Australia' The transnational movement of low-paid, low-skilled migrants across national borders is a significant characteristic of this era (Sassen, 2006; Wark, 2001). Within the context of significant change linked to such patterns as transnational migration flows and the mobility of capital and labour, a new legal order has emerged to deal with and facilitate the cross-border movement of capital, goods and services (Kapur, 2005; Sassen, 2000). This has been characterised in recent decades by the diversification of both the forms and practices of exploitation and the modes of regulation (Weber & Bowling, 2004; Loader & Sparks, 2002). These issues and tensions are central to the concerns that will be addressed in this seminar. The discussion will advance some early reflections on a recent project conducted in regional NSW examining contemporary forms of the exploitation of temporary migrant labourers and associated practices of labour regulation and law enforcement.
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