BY PIP HINMAN
Centacare, a religious welfare group which met with the United Nations teams inspecting South Australia's Woomera detention centre on May 30, said the teams were shocked at what they saw. Dale West from Centacare told the ABC that said UN visitors "were pretty much shaken by the experience".
Justice Prafullachandra Natwarlal Bhagwati, an envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson and a UN working group on arbitrary detention are inspecting detention centres at the request of refugee, church, trade union and human rights organisations.
Some 500 people are detained at Woomera, of whom 100 are children. Some have been locked up for years. On April 23, a member of the government's advisory group, Paris Aristotle, told ABC TV's 7.30 Report that incidences of self-harm inside Woomera were increasing and that staff were finding it impossible to "prevent harm from occurring ... particularly in the case of children".
West also told the ABC that the UN inspectors were not fooled by the make-over at Woomera which involved the removal of barbed wire, the splashing around of a liberal amount of fresh paint and the planting of gardens and trees.
The Howard government has been reluctant to agree to the UN visit. It relented under pressure, but placed strict conditions on the visitors including that they not talk to the media while in Australia.
The same restrictions have been placed on the UN Human Rights Commission Working Group of Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), headed by Louis Joinet, which will visit detention centres in Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and NSW.
At the beginning of May, there were 1258 refugees locked up in mainland detention centres; more than a quarter of these are from Afghanistan. More than 1000 are locked up in Australian-run detention centres on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.
Representatives from Rural Australians for Refugees, ChilOut (Children out of Detention), the National Council of Churches, Australians for a Just Refugee Program; Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific (ASAP), United Nations Youth Association, lawyers acting on behalf of detainees and a former Afghan detainee from the Progressive Young Hazaras told Bhagwati that detainees are denied their fundamental human rights in the detention centres.
Riz Wakil, a former detainee from Curtin detention centre and now an activist in the Free the Refugee Campaign, told the Indian judge that he and others had been denied basic medical attention while in the centre. Wakil said he was often afflicted by crippling stomach pains and was told repeatedly by medical officers to drink "three glasses of water". He also described how children are being denied access to education.
Wakil labelled the Howard government's offer of $2000 to those who returned to Afghanistan as cruel. "We know Afghanistan is still not safe, and we want to stay here and rebuild our lives", Wakil told Bhagwati.
The delegation warned Bhagwati of the government's recent efforts to sanitise Woomera. There were reports that before the UN visit Australasian Correctional Management, the private prison operators, had issued an appeal to charities for additional furniture and equipment.
In a joint statement, the groups said that it was "important to remember that these 'improvements' had only come about because of increased scrutiny and extensive concern about the living conditions and treatment of detainees". They added: "However, despite the 'window dressing', fundamental human rights abuse continues as a direct result of the nature of detention itself combined with the privatisation of management which hides full accountability."
The groups urged Bhagwati to "speak to those who had been detained for one, two, three or more years; the men held in isolation cells; the women separated from husbands released on temporary protection visas who remained in detention with their children as 'insurance' against the men absconding; the children psychologically scarred and those who have engaged in self-mutilation".
The groups also called on the Howard government to respond to the allegations of torture used in deportation procedures including the forcible use of drugs, physical restraints to legs and arms and the gagging of some refugees.
United Nations Association (Australia) president Margaret Reynolds told Green Left Weekly that she hoped the UN envoy would "hear the testimonies of detainees, former detention centre staff and public statements from legal, medical and psychiatric professions". There's enough evidence to suggest that the government's treatment of detainees, including detention, breaches the UN Convention Against Torture and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Reynolds said.
James Thomson, the National Council of Churches' refugee advocacy officer, is of the same opinion. He hopes the UN visit will find evidence that Australia's policy of mandatory detention violates international law. "The key issue is whether the indefinite detention of all asylum seekers with no right to challenge the lawfulness of one's detention violates [international] human rights standards Australia has helped formulate", he said.
The UN inspectors will report their findings to the 59th session of the UN Commission for Human Rights, which will be held next year.
From Green Left Weekly, June 5, 2002.
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