Life on the West Island - Watching human rights

The West Island government has received some sobering news in the latest annual World Report from Human Rights Watch (HRW), a respected international non-governmental organisation headquartered in New York, which conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The influential group pressures governments, policymakers, companies, and individual human rights abusers to denounce abuse and respect human rights, and says that it often works on behalf of refugees, children, migrants, and political prisoners.

In the foreword to its latest report, Human Rights Watch states that crises do not come from nowhere – they are cultivated by governments that do not uphold their obligations to their people. The report outlines its approach to evaluating human rights in countries across the world:

Left unchecked, the egregious actions of abusive governments escalate, cementing the belief that corruption, censorship, impunity and violence are the most effective tools to achieve their aims. Ignoring human rights violations carries a heavy cost, and the ripple effects should not be underestimated.

In that context, the detailed chapter about the West Island in the latest report is challenging and alarming. It comes just two months after several state governments denied access to prisons and juvenile detention centres for members of the United Nations Committee Against Torture.

The HRW report is described by The Saturday Paper as documenting a country that is indolent and indifferent. Abuses that are well known continue without intercession.

Among the abuses described by HRW are:

• The gross over-representation of First Nations people in prisons. Indigenous prisoners account for 32% of those in custody, yet they make up only 3.8% of the total West Island population. Independent reports show that Indigenous peoples are 20 times more likely to be imprisoned by lower courts for minor offences than members of the non-indigenous community and that a much lower proportion of First Nations peoples are granted bail. A quarter of all Indigenous people in detention are on remand without bail.
• The report found that many rights of children are not adequately protected or upheld and that the age of criminal responsibility is substantially below world standards. It also noted that during Covid lockdowns, schools used technology to inappropriately conduct surveillance on students.
• The West Island continues to operate offshore detention facilities, holding for indefinite periods people who have committed no crime against national or international law.
• People with disabilities are disproportionately held in solitary confinement, sometimes for years at a time. Meanwhile, mental health services are underfunded and inadequate. More than half of the people who die in prison are disabled.
• In aged care, already low standards have been exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. Many residents with dementia are physically restrained or drugged into submission (so-called “chemical restraint”). A high proportion of aged care facilities fail to meet compliance standards and many do not have adequate choices of quality foods.
• The report was particularly critical of West Island laws which target peaceful protestors, especially climate activists, who can face up to two years in prison for promoting their beliefs in public. HRW sees these laws as political persecution and as restricting the democratic right to protest against government and corporate policies and practices.
• HRW identifies the West Island as one of the largest contributors to the climate crisis as it is one of the largest exporters fossil fuels coal and gas. Expansion is officially and enthusiastically supported through subsidies and tax concessions, and the government denies its responsibility for West Island coal and gas burned overseas.
• The West Island has violated the rights of Torres Strait Islanders by failing to protect them from impacts of climate change. The report notes that the United Nations has insisted that the national government should pay these islanders compensation.

The Saturday Paper puts some of these failures of the past year in context: The excesses are there like numbers in a spreadsheet: 17 Indigenous people dead in custody; 444 children under the age of 14 in prison; $11.6 billion in fossil fuel subsidies.

HRW also criticises the West Island’s international performance by failing to call out human rights abuses in other nations, including Vietnam, India, Cambodia and the Philippines. As well, it has failed to impose sanctions against the military regime in Myanmar, unlike the EU, USA and Britain. It also says that there are no targeted sanctions against systematic Chinese repression of Uighurs.

Overall, the HRW report is a sad catalogue of West Island failures to respect and promote human rights. They could well have included the disgraceful manner in which the democratic rights of Norfolk Islanders have been trampled.

So, who is watching the destruction of human rights in our nation? Human Rights Watch, for one.