Nation’s prisons face new scrutiny

On May 2, Attorney-General Robert McClelland and Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith announced that Australia had begun the process of becoming a party to the Optional Protocol of the Convention against Torture. This will allow both international and national scrutiny of our various systems of detention.

The announcement by McClelland and Smith received little media attention, even though it amounts to a significant step by Australia in enhancing human rights protections and represents a welcome reversal of the Howard government’s thumbing its nose at the prospect of international scrutiny of our detention facilities.

The practical impact of Australia becoming a party to the optional protocol is that those thousands of individuals who are detained in our prisons, youth training centres and detention centres will now have a greater opportunity to prevent being subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

By signing the optional protocol, Australia is now subject to a system of regular visits undertaken by independent international and national bodies to places where people are deprived of their liberty, in order to prevent torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.In other words, we now have in Australia a potentially important safeguard against abuse of detainees.

There will be many Australians who will no doubt think that while prisons and other detention facilities are uncomfortable for those who are forced to occupy them, our governments do not allow torture or cruel and unusual, inhuman and degrading treatment. Such behaviour is, on this view, confined to repressive regimes like Zimbabwe, China, or Sudan.This view is misguided.

There are many examples of cruel and unusual and degrading punishment regimes across Australia. Take, for example, continuous strip searching of prisoners. It is common practice for corrective services authorities in all of our jails to demand that prisoners, both male and female, be strip searched when going to and from court each day, and before and after they have contact visits with friends and family. Strip searches are also carried out at random on prisoners. These strip searches involve prisoners having to stand naked, part their buttocks, bend over and be prodded and poked by prison officers. Such searches have been found by European courts to amount to inhuman and degrading treatment.

In our prisons there are also strict regimes for some prisoners which allow only very limited out of- cell access, sometimes as little as one hour a day. In Sydney’s notorious Long Bay prison hospital, a new regime has just been introduced which locks prisoners in their cells from 3.45pm until 8.15am. The medium- and long-term impacts of such draconian regimes might well be said to amount to torture and inhuman treatment. In our youth detention centres, there are children as young as 10. This itself could be said to amount to torture and inhuman punishment. Those running such detention centres have powers to use force on young people in certain circumstances, and to punish young people by isolating them from their fellow detainees for lengthy periods.

While, on occasions, the abuse in our prisons and other detention facilities makes front-page news, the ill-treatment of asylum-seeker detainees at centres like Baxter and Villawood is more often than not a case of out of sight and out of mind. Even more disturbingly, some elements of the Australian media seem to gloat over the prospect of convicted prisoners being treated in an inhumane manner by their jailers.

One hopes that the role of any national group established by the Rudd Government to ensure Australia’s compliance with the Convention against Torture would be to educate the community about why humane treatment of detainees is so fundamentally important in our society, and at the same time, to fight against media prejudice against detainees.

In a civilised liberal democracy there is no place for torture or cruel and inhuman punishment, no matter what crime has been committed. The Rudd Government has taken an important step in adopting the optional protocol because it means that Australia now needs to lift its game when it comes to methods of detention.

More importantly, it sends a signal to those detained that there is international scrutiny of those who are detaining them.

Greg Barns, Rights Australia

First published in The Canberra Times, 19 May 2008