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Child
Detention and Torture in Australia
Canberra’s
Treatment of Refugees
By
Binoy Kampmark
12
March, 2015
Apparently,
the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, is “sick of being
lectured to”. One should add that this lecturing is framed in
a more collective sense – Australians, he argues, are tired of
those soap box enthusiasts who keep reminding them of human rights
obligations. The latest figure on the podium of moral
unctuousness is the special rapporteur on torture Juan Mendez, whose
report on child detention in Australia’s offshore processing
centres does not make pretty reading.
The
UN report by Mendez, himself a human rights specialist who received a
fair share of torture at the hands of the military regime in
Argentina during the 1970s, argues that various aspects of Canberra’s
treatment of refugees on Manus and Nauru may amount to the breach of
the UN Torture Convention. Four specific cases have been cited.
“I think it is my duty,” Mendez claims, “to tell Australia
that, at least in that respect, and in respect of keeping children in
detention, that policy needs to be corrected” (Sydney Morning
Herald, Mar 10).
The
volatile and violent situation on Manus Island is noted, including
the “intimidation and ill-treatment of two asylum seekers” who
provided statements on the violent clash at the centre last year.
The expansion of Australian powers via the Maritime Powers Act to
detain asylum seekers at sea and then render them back also
constituted a violation of the convention (Sydney Morning Herald, Mar
10).
The
process is typical Abbotian brutishness. Prior to
dismissing the UN report on Monday, he attempted to dismiss the
entire work of Professor Gillian Triggs’ about the appalling
mistreatment of children in Australia’s crude detention network.
The Forgotten Children report by the Australian Human Rights
Commission will rank in the human rights canon as a primary document
of a country’s brutalisation of asylum-seeker children.
Abbott,
however, preferred to dismiss its extensive and detailed findings as
a “transparent stitch-up” authored in the name of partisanship.
The Attorney-General, George Brandis, was also mobilised in the
battle, urging Triggs to resign. (We are still trying to
ascertain whether he corruptly tried luring her away from her job
with an “inducement”.)
Like
other documents of its sort before, it is being whisked away – into
archives, onto distant inaccessible shelves – and dismissed by the
powers that be. Government officials have, as evidenced by
statements, not read it. Ditto their supporters.
Normalised cruelty incessantly banishes the nasty details.
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton resorts to the language of a dull
service provider. “Australia is meeting all its international
obligations and with other regional nations provides a range of
services to people who have attempted to enter Australia
illegally.”[1] In its place exists steadfast denial and false
appraisals of hope. That is the vision of the gulag coffee and
tea set in Canberra.
That
Triggs is a public officer, empowered to conduct inquiries into the
subject of Australian compliance with its international treaty
obligations, did not seem to perturb the undergraduate-styled
pugilist. “Bullying is an ugly thing,” writes Australian
legal veteran Julian Burnside. “It is regrettable in the
schoolyard; it is despicable in a national leader. We have seen
it before, in leaders whose names are reviled in history.”[2]
Unsatisfied
with levelling his pellets of abuse at Triggs, Abbott has decided to
get into that fashionable pastime of UN bashing. He suggests
that its representatives would “have a lot more credibility if they
were to give some credit to the Australian government” for stopping
boat arrivals (read, stopping asylum seekers from arriving in
Australia by boat). He even claims that “the UN rapporteur
didn’t even bother… getting a proper response from the Australian
government” (The Australian, Mar 11). Quite a suggestion,
given that the Australian government never deemed it proper to
respond to the requests of the rapporteur to cite its versions of the
fact.
Fanciful
nonsense always accompanies the government mantra that stopping such
vessels has led to an end of “the deaths at sea”. “The
most humanitarian, the most decent, the most compassionate thing you
can do,” claims the indignant Prime Minister, “is stop these
boats because hundreds, we think about 1200 in fact, drowned at sea
during the flourishing of the people smuggling trade under the former
government.”
Two
points stand out. The first is that stopping a line of asylum
seekers simply displaces it, shuffling the chain of supply to other
routes, and other destinations. Indonesian territorial waters
have been breached in the efforts of the Australian navy to repel
asylum seeker vessels, often by means of life boats. Little is
heard about that particular assault on sovereignty.
The
second point is fundamental. Supposedly preventing deaths at
sea entails savaging the survivors on land, confining them to
prison-like quarters with promises that they will never, even when
found to be refugees, find a home in Australia. It is precisely
the nature of that treatment that is being pointed out in the report
– incarceration, notably of children, that violates a slew of
international conventions.
The
source of humanitarian crisis and the catalyst for such movements of
people do not stop because the drawbridge is lifted. The good
conscience of Australia’s officials is such that deaths at sea, as
long as they don’t happen on route to Australia, is nothing to be
worried about. Insulated, with a free conscience, the
Abbotophiles can continue to treat international law, not so much as
a dead letter as an irrelevant one.
Dr.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College,
Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Notes:
See also -
Australia again justifies torture as a means to an end, this time by attacking the UN
Indonesian
minister warns his country could release 10,000 asylum seekers to
Australia
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