MANDATORY SENTENCING The following article was published in "The Guardian", newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday, March 22, 2000. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills. Sydney. 2010 Australia. Phone: (612) 9212 6855 Fax: (612) 9281 5795. CPA Central Committee: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "The Guardian": <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Webpage: http://www.cpa.org.au> Subscription rates on request. ****************************** Revelations of a cover-up last week by the Howard Government of a damning UN report on mandatory sentencing laws followed an admission by one of its Senators that the laws were formulated for the express purpose of jailing Indigenous people. Senator Alan Ferguson's statements in the Senate on March 15 went virtually unnoticed, but they gel perfectly with other developments such as the cover-up and the overall aim of the Government to completely dispossess Indigenous Australians. by Marcus Browning Those sections of the UN Human Rights Commission report which said Australia's mandatory sentencing laws violate international human rights conventions were deleted by the Government, leaving the way open for Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer to announce that it contained "no judgements about Australia's conformity with international standards". The sections deleted include: * "The practice of mandatory sentencing is, in reality, a violation of the right to a fair trial by an independent and impartial court." * "The exercise of juvenile justice in Australia would appear to be in violation of human rights standards prohibiting discrimination." * "Mandatory sentencing rules are typically imposed by political authorities on the judiciary and they thus violate the usual requirements that the executive be separate and distinct from the judiciary." Greens Senator Bob Brown, who has put forward the Bill to override mandatory sentencing laws as they affect children in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, said Downer should resign. "Not only has the Government gagged the House, it is now clear it actively set out to hide from Parliament and the people damaging UN advice that mandatory sentencing violates Australia's treaty obligations", said Senator Brown. "The agent was Mr Downer. He has deceived the nation. He should go." He recalled that this was not the first backroom tinkering with UN decisions. "It is a repeat of the government's tour de force in having the World Heritage Committee override expert advice last year calling for the Kakadu World Heritage Area to be declared endangered because of the Jabaluka uranium mine. "The Howard Government is a repeat offender." In his statement on the mandatory sentencing laws, South Australian Senator Ferguson revealed another part of the Government's agenda which exposes it as nothing less than genocidal. "For a start", he said, "people who live in Sydney or in the leafy suburbs of Melbourne, Adelaide or anywhere else -- many of whom are supporters of Senator Brown's Bill -- probably have very few Indigenous people living within their electorate, so they do not really understand some of the problems that exist once you get into areas like the Territory or some of the far reaches of Western Australia where the issue of law and order is constantly on the minds of residents." Lest the point was missed, Ferguson emphasised it: "People who live in Darwin and elsewhere in the Northern Territory have realised that they have a considerable problem with law and order which cannot always be dealt with in conventional ways so they, as the people responsible for providing the laws within their own territory, passed the mandatory sentencing legislation." The UN report highlighted that the "use of mandatory sentencing in an environment where a very high proportion of one racial group, which is in addition a minority population and economically marginalised, are likely to be incarcerated is, at a bare minimum, extremely inappropriate and probably in violation of numerous international human rights standards ..." That is why in Western Australia alone the rate of incarceration of Indigenous to non-indigenous people is 60:1. The Chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Geoff Clark, has vowed to campaign both in Australia and overseas to have the laws repealed. He is now in Geneva for talks at the UN Human Rights Commission. "National and international scrutiny of these laws is clearly mounting and I will be doing everything possible at the UN to ensure this continues", said Mr Clark. ********************** -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
