Is it possible that the courts location may play an active role in how Australian children are viewed by the Federal Court of Australia?

From my very personal experience I believe it certainly does. Whether your child’s case is being heard in Victoria, rather than in Queensland may play a very significant role in how your child and his rights to protection and advancement are viewed by the court.

I have reported in previous articles (see end of article) how the State of Queensland repeatedly denied my son legal youth advocacy in a complaint about severe school bullying and education discrimination in the Queensland Anti Discrimination Commission, the Queensland Anti Discrimination Tribunal and other courts.

In my self published articles I detailed how the State of Queensland denied my son life changing and urgently required speech therapy as offered to children with Down’s Syndrome because it was just ‘not Queensland Government policy’ to provide the necessary treatment to him.

My son was repeatedly denied early education intervention and speech therapy even though a Queensland Health paediatrician identified speech therapy as very urgent and key to successful outcomes for him at school and in his personal and social life.

However my son’s future and his personal welfare was unfortunately not considered as important as the welfare of children with other medical conditions such as for instance children with Down’s Syndrome.

This was very surprising because my son was identified well before his 2nd birthday as requiring urgent early education intervention “if he is to succeed at school”. And it was clear that he would be attending a regular school as he was deemed “too intelligent” for special school and not considered to be intellectually impaired and therefore unable to access disability services or any other kind of services in the State of Queensland.

All my attempts to seek urgent assistance for my child where thwarted by both the State and the Commonwealth who were not interested in my child’s welfare and ignored his rights to positive outcomes as per The Rights Of The Child.

I was also unable to access any assistance from powerful lobby groups such as the Down’s syndrome lobby group or Deaf Children Australia to fight for my child as he did not have Down’s syndrome and was not hearing impaired.

When my son was severely bullied at school due to his untreated medical condition I complained to the Queensland Anti Discrimination Commissioner whose primary concern was unfortunately protecting her job, and not the welfare and future of my son.

The politically appointed Commissioner did absolutely nothing for my child, always refused to speak to me and allowed us to be dragged through a harrowing and year long legal process in her Commission, while denying my son access to a qualified legal youth advocate.

She demanded that I as his mother act as his untrained legal youth advocate, while Education Queensland’s’ legal department put their best lawyers and barristers to work on the case against us.

I complained about the inequality and discrimination by Queensland Juvenile Justice to Australia’s disgraceful and unaccountable Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (hreNOT) which rejected my complaint on the grounds that it is against the law to lodge human rights complaints with hreoNOT against the State of Queensland.

I then applied to the Federal Court of Australia in Brisbane for a judicial review to examine whether hreoNOT was indeed legally, morally and ethically entitled to reject my legitimate complaint on jurisdictional grounds.

Particularly considering that hreoNOT is allegedly based on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), The Rights Of The Child and The Rights Of The Disabled.

Federal Court Judge, Geoffrey Spender, who heard my complaint found that hreoNOT was correct in rejecting my human rights complaint because it is indeed against the law to lodge human rights complaints with hreoNOT against the State of Queensland.

The State of Queensland had successfully made itself immune from prosecution.

Now how convenient is that for a regime bent on secrecy and which consistently ignores human rights and puts itself above the law?

Because our Federal Court case was not deemed to be a criminal matter, my son was also denied the right to have the case heard by a jury, because in Australia only criminals are entitled to be tried by a jury.

My son was also inexplicably denied access to the Federal Court of Australia’s pro bono legal scheme and I was forced to legally represent him there also, despite being a layperson without any legal qualification or experience.

Why criminals are entitled to preferential treatment in Australia’s courts is a complete mystery to me and most Australians.

Thomas Jefferson said, "I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."

Challenging the court’s jurisdiction on trials without a jury is inadvisable, and can lead you in hot water as many Australians have been arrested and dragged directly from the courtroom downstairs to jail cells for ‘contempt of court’ when they demanded to be tried by a jury, and also for wearing T-shirts proclaiming “Democracy is a trial by jury”.

Knowing this, I didn’t even bother to ask for a trial by jury, because I knew my son would be further traumatised if I was illegally arrested and jailed for daring to point out the glaring discrimination and refusal of equality before the law and the courts.

Another education discrimination complaint against Education Queensland, (Hurst and Devlin v Education Queensland) took five long years to resolve, and it appears that in this case the two children involved were also unable to access the courts pro bono legal scheme and were partly funded by Deaf Children Australia.

Education Queensland reportedly spent a staggering $ 1.2 Million aggressively defending the case.  http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/qld/content/2005/s1346458.htm  http://www.thedaily.com.au/news/2005/may/23/scd-bitter-tears-flow-for-loss-of-family/

It really does appear to me that where your case is heard matters greatly. The outcome may not be the same if it is heard in Queensland rather than in Victoria.

It may very well also matter whether your case is against a government department or not.

The case of a young boy called Alex suffering from gender dysphoria was again mentioned in the Australian media recently. In stark contrast to my sons court treatment, in this case the court bent over backwards to protect the child’s identity and appointed a legal youth advocate for the boy from the very first hearing.

The Judge heard the case in a closed court, prohibited publication of the court file no and also suppressed details of the people involved in the case and even in what state the case was heard and in what state the boy lived. As Alastair Nicholson is the former Chief Judge of the Federal Court of Australia and based in Melbourne, I believe that the case was probably heard in Victoria.

I have lifted some noteworthy details from this child’s published court decision for comparison here. It goes without saying that I am totally sympathetic to Alex and his condition and that I am very glad that he seems to have been treated well by the courts and had access to legal youth advocacy and was afforded protection by society and the state as per The Rights Of The Child.

Bearing in mind that Australia agreed to observe its’ international obligations under the treaty when it signed the legally binding ICCPR in 1976.

Lifted from the published case decision re Alex:

Additional Parties
12. I appointed a Child Representative on the first occasion that the matter was before me. I would record my appreciation that the responsible legal aid authority expedited the process of approving the necessary funding.

13. Subsequently, at my invitation, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (“the Commission”) intervened without objection in the proceedings pursuant to s 92 of the Act. The Commission indicated that it would confine itself to making submissions on the human rights principles applicable to the case and would not seek to be heard in respect of the evidence specific to Alex . It was agreed that the detail of the Commission’s submissions should be in written form with an opportunity for the Applicant and the Child Representative to respond within seven days. No submissions in response were in fact filed.

14. For the sake of completeness, I record that I permitted a representative of a statutory Office concerned with the rights and interests of people with disabilities to observe the proceedings, again without objection. The Office did not seek to intervene.

15. I hasten to add that my approval of the presence of the Office as an observer was not because any of the parties or I construed that Alex has a disability but rather because Offices of this type are also concerned with matters of this nature, particularly as they affect children and young people. I therefore took the view that it is in the interests of the broader community for such an Office to have the benefit of observing the proceedings in circumstances where Alex’s privacy was safeguarded...

Of course my son and I wish Alex all the very best and sincerely hope he is happy and doing well. I also hope that no errors were made in his treatment as at least one journalist suggested that he received the wrong treatment as he may not actually suffer from true gender dysphoria.

I would really have much preferred not even having to mention Alex’s court case, had my own son not been treated so very differently in the Queensland court system hearing his human rights complaint.

Unlike Alex, the following courts and quasi courts all denied my son legal youth advocacy and equality before the law and before the courts as per The Rights Of The Child, The Rights Of The Disabled and The ICCPR (1976), and put us through a harrowing ordeal lasting many years:

The Queensland Anti Discrimination Commission, Queensland Anti Discrimination Tribunal, Queensland Supreme Court, Queensland Appeals Court, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission of Australia and Federal Court of Australia in Brisbane.

All of the above courts refused to recognise my sons human rights under international law and all of them denied him legal youth advocacy and hreoNOT refused to even accept his complaint of discrimination by Juvenile Justice Queensland on ‘jurisdictional grounds’!

The President of the Queensland Anti Discrimination Tribunal, Jean Dalton QC, went ballistic when I repeatedly tried to bring the issue of inequality and The Rights Of The Child to her attention. We were very scared of her and my son was very upset after witnessing her outburst of sustained rage from the bench.

The judges were biased and aggressive and our courtroom audio tapes and transcripts were severely edited in order to pervert the course of justice. But the State has dogmatically refused to do anything about my documented and corroborated complaints to date.

"Judicial corruption means the voice of the innocent goes unheard, while the guilty act with impunity. Equal treatment before the law is a pillar of democratic societies. When courts are corrupted by greed or political expediency, the scales of justice are tipped, and ordinary people suffer," said Huguette Labelle, Chair of Transparency International.

How hreoNOT behaved in the Federal Court of Australia in my son’s case could not have been any different from how hreoNOT advocated for “human rights principles” and the interest it seems they showed towards the welfare of Alex, and I think this is very significant.

I am also convinced that retired Queensland Supreme Court Judge, Geoff Davies QC, absolutely hit the nail on the head when he said in his Supreme Court address “government stacking the courts with political favourites is the main evil in the administration of justice in Australia” (Courier Mail September 1, 2006).

In stark contrast to Alex, my son was consistently denied legal youth advocacy from every quarter, and both my son and I were named and shamed in breach of the ICCPR, The Rights Of The Child and The Rights Of The Disabled in the Federal Court of Australia, the Queensland Anti Discrimination Tribunal and the Queensland Supreme Court.

In dismissing my separate application for anonymity as per the Rights of the Child and the ICCPR, Federal Court Judge Geoffrey Spender said in his decision that “publicity is the authentic hallmark of judicial as distinct from administrative procedure and it is only by open justice that justice can, in the long run, be served”.

In other words, it was in the public interest that my son and I were named and shamed?

And all this happened despite the fact that the Federal Court decision re Alex was published in April 2004, some 12 months before I had to legally represent my own son against an adversarial, biased and very weird hreoNOT in the Federal Court in April 2005.

I even openly prompted human rights? lawyer Christine Fougere during the trial to consider my sons’ human rights to privacy and protection of the state and to advocate for his human rights. However, incredibly she told the court that she had no instructions from hreoNOT in this regard.

She only had instructions from hreoNOT to demand that the case against hreoNOT and the Queensland Juvenile Justice Department be dismissed and that my then 12 year old son pay the court costs of his Kangaroo Court trial.

Christine Fougere, human rights? lawyer for hreoNOT had flown up from Sydney to defend hreoNOT and the Queensland Juvenile Justice Department against my son’s complaint. The Queensland Attorney General refused to be added as a second respondent to my complaint.

Go figure how two children in one country can be treated so differently in the Federal Court of Australia and how this can then be called justice!

Labor Premier Anna Bligh and my local State Labor MP John Mickel and Federal Labor MP Craig Emerson remain incommunicado.

Due to lack of press freedom in Australia my son’s story has not been reported in our home country.

However, The Wall Street Journal, Daylife, Interceder, USA Today, Mathaba, Newstin, and many others have thankfully published several of my following articles.

Thank heavens for the international media without which my son’s story would never be told!

My previous articles in this matter:

Human Rights Commission defends regime – not youth  http://perth.indymedia.org/index.php?action=newswire&parentview=141714

Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Committee a disgrace  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/05/429716.html

QLD Governor Wensley Silent On Judicial Abuse  http://mathaba.net/news/?x=620047

Breakdown of the rule of law  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/03/425273.html

Attorney General misleads the people  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/03/424062.html

Bullied schoolboy wants Anna Bligh to address judicial corruption  http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/02/386941.shtml

Kevin Rudd and Robert McClelland must address corruption  http://la.indymedia.org/news/2009/03/225156.php

Bullied schoolboy wants Kevin Rudd to address judicial corruption  http://www.mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=618292

Australia’s lone stance against civil rights bill: how juristocracy enables this and blocks debate  http://www.mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=616222

Supreme Court 'orders bullied schoolboy to pay costs'  http://mathaba.net/news/?x=572486


Note: The following court media release has more details on Alex’ case:

 http://www.familycourt.gov.au/wps/wcm/connect/FCOA/home/about/Media/Media_Releases/FCOA_Court_Permits_Hormone_Therapy

Published court decision re Alex  http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/FamCA/2004/297.html?query=Alex%20and%20gender