The barrister wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair will represent a group of Australian Aborigines suing the British government over nuclear testing on their land, a report said yesterday.
Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement spokesman Neil Gillespie said Cherie Blair had been engaged by a group from Emu Field, in Australia’s red desert center, who are seeking compensation over 1953 atomic tests by Britain.
Five cases had been lodged in British courts over illnesses linked to the fallout from two nuclear weapons exploded in the Great Victoria Desert in October 1953.
“She has been recruited not because of her old man, but because she’s one of the leading silks in the UK,” Gillespie told the Australian newspaper. “We’re so pleased, she’s an incredible individual, sharp as a samurai sword.”
The firm Hickman and Rose was acting for the group in London, he said.
More than 100 Australian army veterans or their widows have already joined a class action by British soldiers for radiation exposure during the desert tests, which took place between 1952 and 1967.
The local nomadic Maralinga Tjarutja tribes were rounded up and expelled from the area in trains and trucks ahead of the testing program, but some continued to wander across and camp on contaminated land.
Security at the sites was lax and warning signs were in English and unintelligible to the Aborigines.
Some individuals were compensated following a 1985 Australian government inquiry that heard tribespeople had to walk barefoot across radiation-poisoned land because boots issued to them by the authorities did not fit.
Indonesia was to sign an agreement to repatriate two British nationals, including a grandmother languishing on death row for drug-related crimes, an Indonesian government source said yesterday. “The practical arrangement will be signed today. The transfer will be done immediately after the technical side of the transfer is agreed,” the source said, identifying Lindsay Sandiford and 35-year-old Shahab Shahabadi as the people being transferred. Sandiford, a grandmother, was sentenced to death on the island of Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs. Customs officers found cocaine worth an estimated US$2.14 million hidden in a false bottom in Sandiford’s suitcase when
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Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner yesterday signed a coalition deal, paving the way for Sanae Takaichi to become the nation’s first female prime minister. The 11th-hour agreement with the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) came just a day before the lower house was due to vote on Takaichi’s appointment as the fifth prime minister in as many years. If she wins, she will take office the same day. “I’m very much looking forward to working with you on efforts to make Japan’s economy stronger, and to reshape Japan as a country that can be responsible for future generations,”
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