Cases before Australian Courts and Tribunals Concerning Questions of Public International Law 2020

This article summarises Australian cases from 2020, with a focus on the relevance of international law. In the year 2020, international treaties and United Nations (‘UN’) declarations were considered by Australian courts in several key areas, including: the status of Aboriginal Australians under the Constitution; discrimination claims; and migration decisions, particularly those involving deportation due to criminal conduct (that is, cases involving so-called ‘crimmigration’ law). International law was also relevant in Australian cases concerning the human rights implications of COVID-19 restrictions, with the Victorian Supreme Court observing that ‘[h]uman rights are not suspended during states of emergency or disaster’.The publication of the ‘Brereton Report’ — which documents potential war crimes by members of the Australian Defence Force (‘ADF’) in Afghanistan — underscored the relevance of both international humanitarian law and international criminal law to our own military personnel

STRmix™ collaborative exercise on DNA mixture interpretation

An intra and inter-laboratory study using the probabilistic genotyping (PG) software STRmix™ is reported. Two complex mixtures from the PROVEDIt set, analysed on an Applied Biosystems™ 3500 Series Genetic Analyzer, were selected. 174 participants responded. For Sample 1 (low template, in the order of 200 rfu for major contributors) five participants described the comparison as inconclusive with respect to the POI or excluded him. Where LRs were assigned, the point estimates ranging from 2 × 10 <sup>4</sup> to 8 × 10 <sup>6</sup> . For Sample 2 (in the order of 2000 rfu for major contributors), LRs ranged from 2 × 10 <sup>28</sup> to 2 × 10 <sup>29</sup> . Where LRs were calculated, the differences between participants can be attributed to (from largest to smallest impact): This study demonstrates a high level of repeatability and reproducibility among the participants. For those results that differed from the mode, the differences in LR were almost always minor or conservative