Australia braces for UN hearing on rights abuses

By Dewi Anggraeni

MELBOURNE, Australia (JP): Last February in Australia's Northern Territory detention center, a 15 year-old Aboriginal boy, Johnno Wurramarrba hanged himself with a bedsheet.

The youth had stolen a pack of felt-tip pens and some pencils, and had been subsequently sentenced to 28 days in a juvenile detention center. Depressed and scared at being torn apart from his family, he took his own life.

Johnno was not the first, nor was his an isolated case of an Aboriginal death in custody. The social phenomenon of disproportionately high numbers of Aboriginal to non-Aboriginal deaths in custody has been going on for decades.

The Australian Institute of Criminology, for instance, recorded 85 deaths in 1999 and 95 in the previous year while indigenous Australians, who make up just 2 per cent of the population, accounted for almost one quarter of the figures.

These tragic events have not been completely ignored in the country. On Aug. 10, 1987, the then prime minister Bob Hawke established a Royal Commission to investigate the causes of deaths of Aboriginal people while held in State and Territory jails. The final report, signed on April 15, 1991, made 339 recommendations.

Unfortunately there has been very little indication that the implementation of the commission's recommendations has been given priority. They fell, it seems, onto "unfertile ground".

The sad situation continued, the government's political will apparently having been focussed elsewhere, until Johnno's case attracted domestic and international media attention.

The issue was wider this time. The target was the mandatory sentencing laws introduced separately, in the Northern Territory and Western Australia three years ago.

While neither government introduced the laws specifically to victimize the Aboriginal community, it is this very community which suffers the most as a result of these laws.

Various lobby groups have called for them to be repealed. No less than Prime Minister John Howard has been reported many times as saying that he opposed the laws. Constitutionally he could intervene, but until today he has not done so, alleging that he respects the states' right to pass their own laws.

Politicians in both Western Australia and the Northern Territory have defended the laws as necessary to fight crime. It is more than likely that they are also driven by polls that show a majority of voters as being in support.

In this era of open access to information, politicians have to deal with more than domestic political considerations. This is because every contentious issue, in whichever part of the world it arises, especially where human rights violations are involved, can no longer be contained within the boundaries of the country.

On July 13, the day British Prime Minister Tony Blair hosted John Howard in London for the federation centennial celebrations, Blair's barrister wife, Cherie Booth, made public her association with a legal team taking the Australian Government to court over the Northern Territory's mandatory sentencing law.

The team, led by an Australian barrister living in London, Margaret McCabe, has lodged a formal complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva, accusing the Australian Federal Government of breaching human rights by not overruling mandatory sentencing laws in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

The complaint is expected to be heard during the UN committee's 69th session this week, and is based on the arguments that mandatory sentencing laws remove judicial discretion and violate the right to a fair trial, and that the laws indirectly discriminate against indigenous Australians.

Reaction in Australia has come from the offices of the Prime Minister and the Attorney General. Howard told journalists that Booth, being a human rights lawyer, had even acted against her husband's government, implying that her stance against the Australian government was not something that should cause undue worry.

And Daryl Wiliams, the attorney general, said that Booth's involvement in this case was irrelevant to relations between the two nations.

It may be irrelevant to the relations between Australia and Britain, but Booth's involvement has considerably raised the profile of the case and attracted wide international attention. And it obviously has caused considerable unease to warrant such swift high-ranking denials.

It is also another reminder to countries where various forms of human rights violations occur, that they can no longer label them as internal problems which need no outside intervention, nor dress them up as "cultural components" which outsiders do not understand.

The writer is a Melbourne-based journalist and novelist.