I welcome the release of government commissioned report by former integrity commissioner Phillip Moss into claims of sexual harassment and abuse, including three allegations of rape, inside the Australian-funded Nauru immigration detention centre. The report also investigated allegations that staff on Nauru employed by the charity, Save the Children, encouraged refugees to self-harm or manipulate abuse allegations.

The report found the testimony of asylum seekers was credible and convincing, although its veracity could not be verified. It also found some cases of sexual and physical assault were not being reported. The report also found that the allegations that the Save the Children staff encouraged refugees to self-harm or manipulate abuse allegations are not proven.  To read the Moss Review see:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1689988-moss-report-review-conditions-circumstances-nauru.html

The report clearly indicates that the Nauru facility not a proper place to hold children and that major changes need to be made. The immigration department secretary said that his organisation has accepted all 19 recommendations in the report, many of which call for better training for centre staff and Nauruan police and officials while others focus on child protection. The immigration minister, Peter Dutton vowed to work with Nauruan police to build the capacity of local investigators. Similar response was made by the Nauru government undertaking to make improvements in how the Nauru detention centre is administered.

The key point, however, is that there is no place at all for children in immigration detention and that the Australian immigration laws and practices should be changed to ensure our international obligations and in particular those under the CRC article 37 that mandates that “detention is a measure of last resort” to be used only “for shortest appropriate period of time” and be “subject of effective independent review” are being fully adhered to. The findings of my 2004 “A last Resort” inquiry fully demonstrated the negative consequences of for children of mandatory detention and in particular that long term immigration detention clearly exposes children to enormous mental stress (https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/asylum-seekers-and-refugees/publications/last-resort-national-inquiry-children-immigration).

The recent AHR Commission President Triggs the Forgotten Children report (https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/asylum-seekers-and-refugees/publications/forgotten-children-national-inquiry-children) also further exposed the impact of detention on children.

Although I fully acknowledge the progress the Abbott government has made in reducing the number of children in immigration detention to date, I call upon the government to release all the remaining children, with their families, immediately and to change the relevant legislation.

On Friday morning 20 March, Australia learned that we have lost our 22nd Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Malcolm Fraser.

Malcolm Fraser was an important figure in my life. I arrived in Sydney as a refugee in June 1975, only months before the 11 November constitutional crisis.  It has always been difficult for me to comprehend why there was so much hate coming from the left against Fraser. It was E.G. Whitlam, who in my eyes was the villain, because of his handling of the economy, his attitude against South Vietnamese refugees and Australia’s recognition of the incorporation of the Baltic republics into the Soviet Union. The Australian electorate made its judgment and the Fraser government won the largest ever majority.

My next significant experience of the Fraser government was that of losing my job in the Commonwealth Legal Aid Commission in Canberra as a result of “razor gang” actions. However, soon a new opportunity emerged – in 1981 I gained employment when the Fraser government created our first federal Human Rights Commission under the Chairmanship of Dame Roma Mitchell. I spent 5 years with the Commission working on a range of issues, including on the first human rights review of the Migration Act 1958. The Commission was created to implement the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other antidiscrimination measures.

Fraser’s multicultural policies, however, had an enduring impact on my life in Australia. New multicultural policy frameworks were created and racial discrimination removed giving greater access to jobs, English language training and social welfare to new settlers.  Fraser firmly believed that Australia’s culture is greatly enriched by the maintenance of diversity and he linked his political success with the advancement of multicultural policies.

Under Fraser, multiculturalism also emerged as a normative ideal of a society based on the principles of social cohesion, equality of opportunity and cultural identity. The Fraser government also believed that it is the government’s responsibility to respond to the settlement needs of migrants, and the 1978 Galbally report identified a need to provide special services and programs for all migrants to ensure equal opportunity of access to government-funded programs and services with a view to helping migrants to be self-reliant. To implement this ideal a range of bodies were established by the Fraser Government, including an advisory body the Australian Ethnic Affairs Council, the research oriented  Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs and the Special Broadcasting Service “to provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society”.

Fraser was also a strong anti-communist. For me, as a refugee from communist Poland, this was very important. I admired his work in this area and collaborated with the Fraser-initiated 1979 Parliamentary Inquiry on Human Rights in Soviet Union under the Chairmanship of Senator John Wheeldon, with Professor Owen Harries, Fraser’s senior adviser on foreign affairs, Richard Krygier of Quadrant and many others. The Polish community in Australia was particularly grateful to Malcolm Fraser for his active support for the Polish workers movement Solidarity and in particular for his boycott of Moscow Olympics and for his generous and personal assistance for the Help Poland Live Appeal in 1981.

Many have observed that Fraser’s political views have moved from the right to the left in the years after he left government. Last year I attended the Whitlam Oration delivered by Fraser at the University of Western Sydney and I found his change of opinion about the usefulness of the USA-Australia military alliance to be particularly challenging but unsupportable.

His work for human rights and multicultural Australia, however, was consistent both in and out of government.  Particular achievements in this area include: the establishment of the Australia’s first Human Rights Commission, the office of Commonwealth Ombudsman and the first Freedom of Information laws; removal of racial discrimination from Australia’s institutions, and in particular from our immigration practices; his deep interest in the advancement of indigenous people and in humanitarian work, including supporting asylum seekers and welcoming thousands of refugees form South Vietnam to Australia; and defining and on-going commitment to multiculturalism. Fraser’s unwavering opposition to apartheid won him high international standing. I also pay tribute to his anti-communist work that clearly contributed to the end of the Cold War and the freedom of East and Central Europe from communist oppression.

Fraser’s human rights work will be widely recognised and long remembered, as will his positive role in restoring economic calm after the turbulence of the Whitlam government experience.

Vale Malcolm Fraser.

GENEVA (19 March 2015) – The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) may have committed all three of the most serious international crimes – namely war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide – according to a report issued by the UN Human Rights Office on Thursday.

The report, compiled by an investigation team sent to the region by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights late last year, draws on in-depth interviews with more than 100 people who witnessed or survived attacks in Iraq between June 2014 and February 2015. It documents a wide range of violations by ISIL against numerous ethnic and religious groups in Iraq, some of which, it says, may amount to genocide.

It also highlights violations, including killings, torture and abductions, allegedly carried out by the Iraqi Security Forces and associated militia groups.

The report finds that widespread abuses committed by ISIL include killings, torture, rape and sexual slavery, forced religious conversions and the conscription of children. All of these, it says, amount to violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some may constitute crimes against humanity and/ or may amount to war crimes.

However, the manifest pattern of the attacks against the Yezidi “pointed to the intent of ISIL to destroy the Yezidi as a group,” the report says. This “strongly suggests” that ISIL may have perpetrated genocide.

The report, requested by the UN Human Rights Council at the initiative of the Government of Iraq,* cites the brutal and targeted killings of hundreds of Yezidi men and boys in the Ninewa plains last August. In numerous Yezidi villages, the population was rounded up. Men and boys over the age of 14 were separated from women and girls. The men were then led away and shot by ISIL, while the women were abducted as the ‘spoils of war.’ “In some instances,” the report found, “villages were entirely emptied of their Yezidi population.”

Some of the Yezidi girls and women who later escaped from captivity described being openly sold, or handed over as “gifts” to ISIL members. Witnesses heard girls – as young as six and nine years old – screaming for help as they were raped in a house used by ISIL fighters. One witness described how two ISIL members sat laughing as two teenage girls were raped in the next room. A pregnant woman, repeatedly raped by an ISIL ‘doctor’ over a period of two and a half months, said he deliberately sat on her stomach. He told her, “this baby should die because it is an infidel; I can make a Muslim baby.”

Boys between the ages of eight and 15 told the mission how they were separated from their mothers and taken to locations in Iraq and Syria. They were forced to convert to Islam and subjected to religious and military training, including how to shoot guns and fire rockets. They were forced to watch videos of beheadings. One child was told, “This is your initiation into jihad….you are an Islamic State boy now.”

Brutal treatment was meted out by ISIL to other ethnic groups, including Christians, Kaka’e, Kurds, Sabea-Mandeans, Shi’a and Turkmen. In a matter of days in June, thousands of Christians fled their homes in fear after ISIL ordered them to convert to Islam, pay a tax, or leave.

Also in June, around 600 males held in Badoush prison, mostly Shi’a, were loaded onto trucks and driven to a ravine, where they were shot by ISIL fighters. Survivors told the UN team that they were saved by other bodies landing on top of them.

Those perceived to be connected with the Government were also targeted. Between 1,500 to 1,700 cadets from Speicher army base, most of whom are reported to have surrendered, were massacred by ISIL fighters on 12 June. The findings of Iraqi Government investigations into both the Badoush and Speicher incidents have yet to be made public.

ISIL fighters are reported to have relied on lists of targets to conduct house-to-house and checkpoint searches. A former policeman stated that when he showed his police ID card to ISIL fighters, one of them slashed the throats of his father, five-year-old son and five-month-old daughter. When he begged them to kill him instead, they told him “we want to make you suffer.”

The investigation team received information from numerous sources who alleged that Iraqi Security Forces and affiliated militia had committed serious human rights violations during their counter-offensive operations against ISIL.

During the summer of 2014, as their military campaign against ISIL gained ground, the report says, militias seemed to “operate with total impunity, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.”

In mid-June, fleeing Iraqi forces allegedly set fire to an army base in Sinsil, in Diyala province, where 43 Sunnis were held prisoner. In another incident, at least 43 prisoners were allegedly shot dead in the al-Wahda police station in Diyala. Villagers reported being rounded up and taken to al-Bakr airbase at Salah-ad-Din where, the report says, torture is allegedly routine. There were also numerous accounts of Sunnis being forced from their homes at gunpoint.

As one witness put it: “we hoped for the best when the Iraqi army and the ‘volunteers’ liberated the area from ISIL. Instead…they pillaged, burnt and blew up houses, claiming that all villagers are part of ISIL. This is not true; we are just ordinary poor people.”

The report concludes that members of Iraqi Security Forces and affiliated militia “carried out extrajudicial killings, torture, abductions and forcibly displaced a large number of people, often with impunity.” By doing so, it says, they “may have committed war crimes.”

However, it also pointed out that since the fall of Mosul last June, the line between regular and irregular Iraqi Government forces has become increasingly blurred. It suggests that “while more information is needed on the link between the militia and the Government,” some incidents point, at the very least, to a failure by the Government to protect persons under its jurisdiction.

The report adds that it is the Government’s responsibility to ensure that all organized armed forces, groups and units are placed under a command responsible for the conduct of its subordinates.

It called on the Iraqi Government to investigate all crimes outlined in the report and bring the perpetrators to justice.

It also urged the Government to become a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and ensure that the international crimes defined in that Statute are criminalised under domestic law.

The report also calls on the Human Rights Council to urge the UN Security Council to address, “in the strongest terms, information that points to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes,” and to consider referring the situation in Iraq to the International Criminal Court.

ENDS

*The report was requested at a Special Session of the UN Human Rights Council on 1 September 2014. The Council requested the High Commissioner for Human Rights to send a mission to Iraq to investigate alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law committed by ISIL and associated terrorist groups. For more information, see:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/SpecialSessions/Session22/Pages/22ndtSpecialSession.aspx

The full report is available on the OHCHR website at: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session28/Documents/A_HRC_28_18_AUV.doc

GENEVA (10 March 2015) – The United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, Juan E. Méndez, today urged States to adopt new alternatives to the  detention of children that fulfill the child’s best interests and the authorities’ obligation to protect them from torture or other ill-treatment.

“The detention of children is inextricably linked – in fact if not in law – with the ill-treatment of children, owing to the particularly vulnerable situation in which they have been placed that exposes them to numerous types of risk,” Mr. Méndez said during the presentation of his latest report* to the UN Human Rights Council.

“The particular vulnerability of children imposes a heightened obligation of due diligence on States to take additional measures to ensure their human rights to life, health, dignity and physical and mental integrity,” he said. “However, the response to address the key issues and causes is often insufficient.”

The human rights expert noted that the deprivation of liberty of children is intended to be a last resort measure, to be used only for the shortest possible period of time, only if is in the best interests of the child, and limited to exceptional cases.

“Failure to recognize or apply these safeguards increases the risk of children being subjected to torture or other ill-treatment, and implicates State responsibility,” Mr. Méndez warned. He called for the adoption of “higher standards to classify treatment and punishment as cruel, inhuman or degrading in the case of children.”

In addition, the Special Rapporteur pointed out that inappropriate conditions of detention – including pretrial and post-trial incarceration as well as institutionalisation and administrative immigration detention- exacerbate the harmful effects on children deprived of their liberty.

“Within the context of administrative immigration enforcement, it is now clear that the deprivation of liberty of children based on their or their parents’ migration status is never in the best interests of the child,” he added. “It exceeds the requirement of necessity, becomes grossly disproportionate and may constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of migrant children.”
 
“States should, expeditiously and completely, cease the detention of children, with or without their parents, on the basis of their immigration status,” Mr. Méndez said.
“One of the most important sources of ill-treatment of children in those institutions is the lack of basic resources and proper government oversight,” the UN Special Rapporteur noted. “Regular and independent monitoring of places where children are deprived of their liberty is a key factor in preventing torture and other forms of ill-treatment,” he concluded.

(*) Read the full report by the Special Rapporteur (A/HRC/28/68): http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session28/Pages/ListReports.aspx

Mr. Juan E. Méndez (Argentina) was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in November 2010. Mr. Méndez has dedicated his legal career to the defense of human rights, and has a long and distinguished record of advocacy throughout the Americas. He is currently a Professor of Law at the American University – Washington College of Law and Co-Chair of the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association. Learn more, log on to: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Torture/SRTorture/Pages/SRTortureIndex.aspx

The Special Rapporteurs are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

For more information and media requests please contact: Sonia Cronin (+41 22 917 91 60 / scronin@ohchr.org) or Petrine Leweson (+41 22 917 9114 / pleweson@ohchr.org) or write to sr-torture@ohchr.org

For media inquiries related to other UN independent experts:
Xabier Celaya, UN Human Rights – Media Unit (+ 41 22 917 9383 / xcelaya@ohchr.org)