UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson suggested that the Australian government had acted "in an over-defensive way" by cutting cooperation with the United Nations human rights committee system. That seems a diplomatic euphemism. This government has good reason to fear the investigations of human rights bodies, because it is up to its neck in creating and perpetuating human rights abuses.
Attorney-general Daryl Williams' cynical hair- splitting stands out even in a government that invented the distinction between "core" and other promises. He declared that human rights issues in Australia are "minor" compared to "arbitrary arrest, detention and execution, and having your arms chopped off for belonging to the wrong political party".
While it is true that Prime Minister John Howard's government has not yet chopped off any arms, it allows indigenous people to be jailed at a rate many times that of the rest of the population. Many of them die in prison, but the government has failed to implement the reforms recommended by a royal commission to stop the deaths. Instead, it passed the Wik legislation, which abolished property rights of Aboriginal people solely because they were Aboriginal — as the relevant UN committee pointed out.
And how can the Howard government hide behind arbitrary detention, execution and amputations in other countries, when it tries to deny asylum to people fleeing those conditions? Refugees from places like Afghanistan — where amputation is a punishment which the Taliban regime inflicts on its enemies — are herded into remote concentration camps for months and even years while the government seeks pretexts to send them back. (Compared to this detention, which applies to everyone who arrives without a visa, arbitrariness, which might allow at least some to remain free, would be an improvement.)
In parliament, Howard dismissed the need for international review of Australia's human rights record, saying that Australians could cope with any problems in Australia. This is the standard response of regimes like the military dictatorship in Burma, which commits more human rights abuses than the Howard government but is no more cynical about defending them. After all, no-one has accused the Burmese junta of cutting off arms.
Howard's remark also ignores the fact that not everyone in Australia has the same relationship to human rights. Some have their rights trampled on. Others, including the Howard government, do the trampling or defend it. The big majority are in favour of human rights but not fully aware of the government's record — and that's why the government can't afford to have UN committees call attention to it.
It is certainly no accident that the government's move against the UN came only a few days before the scheduled delivery of UN reports on Aboriginal health and on the denial of social security to migrants for two years — reports which the government would have known could not help being critical.
Similarly, from its standpoint, the government has good reason to refuse to sign the protocol allowing women to take complaints to the UN sex discrimination committee: since its election, it has been trying to reverse gains for women's rights.
And it was simply grotesque to hear Howard defending his refusal to sign the protocol with the argument that the "great democracies" of the United States and Britain have not signed. To take just one area of human rights abuses, northern Ireland, Britain has been found guilty by such a non-radical judge as the European Court of Human Rights. And, aside from the worse things it does to most of the rest of the world, the US is distinguished by its treatment of its own citizens, having more of them in prison than any other country in the world.
It's no wonder that Howard feels comfortable in such company. His is the government pushing a bill to use the military against undefined "domestic violence" or threats to commonwealth "interests". That's a revealing indication of what Howard means when he speaks of "Australians" solving "Australian problems". Does anyone think that tear gas and water cannon can be confined indefinitely to Woomera?