A report by the United Nations has found Australia is breaching the international convention against torture in its treatment of some asylum seekers.
The report has been prepared by the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Professor Juan Mendez, and is being tabled in Geneva today at the UN Human Rights Council.
Professor Mendez said Australia had failed to provide adequate detention conditions and that it should end the detention of children.
His report also said Australia should put a stop to the escalating violence on Manus Island.
Read more here: Detainees are blockading the Manus Island detention centre
Human Rights Law Centre director Daniel Webb said Australia was breaching the convention against torture it signed years ago.
“Now Australia is being found to breach that convention to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” he said.
Mr Webb said the report was a condemnation of Australia’s indefinite detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island and the conditions there.
“It is basically Australia being named and shamed on the world stage as a country that fails to comply with the convention against torture, and I think that ought to be a real wake-up call,” he said.
The Federal Government has been contacted for comment.
A version of this post originally appeared on ABC News and has been republished with permission.
Read more: The Forgotten Children report highlights the horrific effect of keeping children in detention.
Top Comments
No more children or adults drowning at see, the number of children in detention down by over 90%, the number of adults also significantly falling, sounds like the available $ is being spent actively reducing the total number of people in detention instead of being wasted on soon to be redundant infrastructure. The recent issues on Manus Island were from people already prossesed who were refusing to leave detention and move into houses, and the latest trouble on Nauru has come from people who have also been processed and are already living in the communities of the Republic of Nauru after being granted asylum. Perhaps Professor Juan Mendez and his pals from the UN could have a look at why they have sat on their hands and taken a reactionary role towards the millions of displaced people. Chapter 1 of the purposes and principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.
The Purposes of the United Nations are:
To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
Actually we do not know whether or not anyone has drowned at sea in Australian waters lately. Our government has been suppressing journalists from investigating and is not providing the media with information.
Furthermore, what difference does it make if they drown inside or outside Australian waters, while they are being towed away or put into other boats? Pushing the problem away doesn't solve anything and just shows what poor international citizens we are, we who are one of the richest nations on earth per capita.
The fact is that there are ~12 million refugees currently in the world, and about 350,000 of them have taken to the sea to seek help in the Asia Pacific region in the past year alone, according to UN stats. They have to go somewhere.
Wars, political violence, authoritarian governments... these things don't stop just because its inconvenient to a politician in Canberra.
Imagine if this current lot of politicians had been around during the holocaust, refusing to take jewish refugees from Germany....
This is the kind of blood we have on our hands, as the UN points out.
Actually we do know quite a bit about the inflows of people into Indonesia, even the UN knows about the dramatic fall in numbers, this from a Feb 2014 report.
"Monthly applications for asylum-seeker registration handled by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office in Jakarta — overwhelmingly the busiest in Indonesia — dropped 71 per cent between February 2013 and last month.
The monthly totals of asylum-seekers newly registered throughout Indonesia fell almost 44 per cent in that time to 434 people in January.
The scale of reduction supports Abbott government claims that Australia’s refusal to accept boatpeople — and, since December, turning their boats back — benefits Indonesia by discouraging many asylum-seekers from entering its borders."
This reduction is a clear indicator that less and less people are attempting to enter Australia this way, deaths at sea therefore must also have also dropped, likely to zero. The government has no power to suppress journalists from investigating anything, if they aren't investigating it's likely they know there's nothing to find, after all this government can't control information coming out of Indonesia or sat phone calls from boats to Australia.
There are 12 million displaced people in the world because the UN has not fulfilled its obligations under its own charter, why do you assume these people would be better off in foreign countries?, would it not be better for them if the issue in their homeland was resolved and they could return to their extended families and communities?.