Australia’s Abu Ghraib

Date: 27 July 2016 - 21:10

News ID: ۲۹۳۲۶

By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

Australia is abusing and torturing its jailed indigenous children and UNICEF says it "may amount to torture”. We couldn’t agree more:
Footage from an ABC investigation this week revealed juvenile detention centre guards in Australia’s Northern Territory shackling, hooding, taunting, and teargassing detained children - as well as leaving them in solitary confinement for extended periods of time. International law says such abuse of children may amount to torture by the government responsible for their care.
What’s more, the haunting footage that aired this week on the investigative program "Four Corners” continues to provoke comparisons to the U.S. military’s illegal torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, scandalizing human rights observers in Australia and worldwide.
In one segment that has garnered particular outrage, 17-year-old Dylan Voller was shown being hooded and shackled to a chair, where he was left in solitary confinement for hours. This is while as a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Australian government must fulfil its promise: ‘No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment...Every child deprived of liberty shall be treated with humanity and respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.’
Far from it, many similar reports of abuse at such detention centres have also been ignored in the past. What we saw in the documentary program is pure evil. This is juvenile justice not just in the Northern Territory but across the whole country, a racist system that punishes troubled children instead of rehabilitating them. The tragic part is that the government which claims to be a protector of human rights has been in the know for a long time, yet did nothing about it.
It gets interesting to note that local media and rights groups in the Northern Territory have been reporting the systematic abuse for years, but it was largely ignored by the government.
The Northern Territory covers over 1,300 square kilometres and has a population of just about 243,700; a third of  whom are Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal people had made many complaints over the years. They have been talking about this sort of treatment for years. The problem is that the government and the international community are not listening. But for how long?
Whatever this is, any inquiries into this centre as regards police and government corruption and systematic abuse of young offenders should lead to some kind of justice for the long-suffering Aboriginal communities in Australia. Unlike the past "Royal Commission” inquiries, this time they should turn up the evidence and the information that the whole world saw on the TV program. They should also lead to some effective action on the part of the government.
We all know what happens when countries that are not in good terms with the West end up in scandals like this. The international backlash is always overwhelming. There will always be widespread outrage and condemnations at the United Nations over its ‘poor human rights record,’ followed by resolutions that call for sanctions and punishments. The question is whether the world body is brave and fair enough to fulfil its mandate and abandon the culture of cover-up and double-standard as regards poor human rights record in Australia?