Australia Restricts Rights Groups
U.N. watchdog bodies must have compelling reasons for wanting to examine Australia's human rights record before the government would agree to visits, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Tuesday.
Australia, unhappy with past U.N. criticism of its treatment of Aborigines and asylum seekers, foreshadowed a complete overhaul of its dealings with the U.N. treaty system.
"We'll only agree to visits to Australia by treaty committees and requests from (human rights) mechanisms for visits and the provision of information where there's a compelling reason to do so," Downer told reporters.
Canberra threatened in March to pull out of the treaty system after the U.N. Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination blasted Australia over Aboriginal land rights legislation and automatic jailing laws in some parts of the country which affect Aborigines more than others.
Australia has been criticized by several U.N. committees for the treatment of its 430,000 Aborigines, the country's most disadvantaged group, who make up 2.3 percent of the population.
A U.N. spokesman in New York said the Geneva-based U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, former Irish President Mary Robinson, "told us this morning that she shares the desire of the Australian government for reforms intended to enhance the effectiveness of the treaty body system."
"In seeking to strengthen this system, she says, utmost care should be taken to continue to work towards achieving universality of the accepted human rights standards," the spokesman said. This would be one of the objectives of the General Assembly's Millennium Summit, to be attended by a large number of heads of state or government from Sept 6 to 8, he added.
Human rights groups and Aboriginal leaders slammed Australia's response to U.N. criticism.
"This is an irresponsible over-reaction to recent poor report cards," Amnesty International's Australian director Kate Gilmore said in a statement. "The government…clearly only wants to play by the rules it likes," she said.
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission accused Canberra of adopting a bunker mentality. Aboriginal leaders said Australia had double standards in criticizing other countries' human rights records while ignoring criticism at home.
"We are willing to condemn any atrocities that have occurred…but as soon as the spotlight is put back on Australia we sort of run scared," Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission chairman Geoff Clark told reporters.
Downer said Australia's decision to scale back its involvement with U.N. committees was made in an attempt to encourage the world body to reform its treaty system.
"We've decided we will take strong measures to improve the effectiveness of the United Nations human rights treaty bodies," Downer said.
He said Australia would begin rejecting unwrranted requests from U.N. committees seeking to delay removal of unsuccessful asylum seekers from Australia.
Australia would also refuse to sign a protocol to eliminate discrimination against women and take a "more economical and selective" approach to its participation in the system.
Attorney-General Daryl Williams repeated long-held grievances with the U.N. treaty committee system.
"Because you have well-resourced NGOs in democratically elected countries, the focus seems to be on minor, marginal issues in those countries, and not on major human rights abuses in countries that don't have democratically elected governments," Williams said.
In its year 2000 report on human rights in Australia, Amnesty found three troubling areas: immigrants rights, child detention and deaths in custody.
Australia's immigration law underwent changes in 1999 that, among other things, prohibits refugees from seeking asylum if the government decides they could have sought asylum elsewhere.
In two Australian states, detained juveniles of Aboriginal ancestry exceeded detained juveniles of non-Aboriginal ancestry by a reported ratio of 230 to one.
Aborigines also died in prison more often.
"Although estimates of the number of deaths in custody showed a slight decline over the previous year, Aborigines continued to make up a disproportionately large percentage of those who died in prison," Amnesty said.
The 1999 U.S. State Department report on Australian rights practices reported that while Aborigines make up 1.6 percent of the population, 19 percent of those in jail—and 17 percent of the 93 people who died in custody in 1998—were Aborigines.
"Nationally, indigenous people are imprisoned at 21 times the rate of nonindigenous people," the U.S. government found.
But the State Dept. report also said Australia, "administers many programs to improve the socioeconomic conditions of Aborigines and Torres Straits Islanders…and to address longstanding discrimination against them."