Articles by Paul Gregoire

This year’s music festival season began with an avoidable tragedy, as two young Australians died after taking drugs at Sydney’s Defqon.1 festival in September. The saturation policing and drug detection dogs at the event failed to save their lives. A pill testing service could have. Despite it being illegal, over half a million primarily young Australians ...

A Tibetan man set himself on fire on 4 November in a peaceful protest in the eastern Tibetan region of Ngawa. The death of 23-year-old Dorbe brings the total number of Tibetans that have self-immolated in order to draw attention to their nation’s plight to 154 since February 2009. Two days later, around 1,000 Tibetan and Uyghur demonstrators ...

There’s a rising awareness that the century-old system of drug prohibition is failing. It’s evident in the global moves to legalise cannabis, the internationally-lauded Portuguese drug decriminalisation model and the widespread calls to start treating drug use as a health issue, not a criminal one. The close to fifty years of the war on drugs has seen ...

This week, the NSW government is set to open up access to all NSW citizens’ driver licence photos and associated personal information, so that it can be utilised by law enforcement agencies across the country and matched with images from CCTV footage in real time. Expected to be passed with bipartisan support, the Road Transport Amendment ...

Kampala is ranked amongst the fastest growing cities in Africa, and reported crime is on the rise Cases of robbery, rape and harassment are common. This has led to a situation where 80 percent of the adolescent girls living in the capital of Uganda don’t feel safe in public. So, three young women – Zaharah (pictured), ...

In another development in the current global shift to the far-right, the world’s fourth largest democracy Brazil elected extremely divisive presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro to office on October 28. And as seems to be part and parcel of the right-wing agenda, Bolsonaro’s campaign rhetoric was riddled with anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric, along with attacks on women, African ...

There was a public outcry mid-year after NSW police began employing a new strategy, whereby punters were denied entry to music festivals following a positive indication by a drug detection dog even though no illicit substances were subsequently found. And despite the fact that there’s been little noise about the use of this quite-possibly-illegal tactic over ...

Currently, there’s an amendment bill before the NSW upper house that if passed would place a two year limit on the amount of time a child can remain in out-of-home care prior to the court having the power to order they be adopted. These laws are set to disproportionately affect Aboriginal communities that are facing ...

The purpose of covert operations is for law enforcement agents to obtain evidence that would not otherwise be accessible using conventional investigatory methods. This secretive acquiring of evidence is meant to be done in a lawful manner, so that it is not liable for exclusion as illegally or improperly obtained evidence under section 138 of ...

Two young people died after taking drugs at the Defqon.1 festival in September. At the time, there was saturation policing at the music festival. There were 194 police officers deployed at the event, some of whom were accompanied by drug detection dogs. The tragedy sparked renewed calls for the roll out of pill testing trials in NSW. ...