A team of UN investigators will examine possible human rights abuses in migrant detention centres in Australia during a two-week visit starting in May, a UN spokesman said yesterday.
The investigation by the UN Commission on Human Rights team is likely to further antagonise relations between the world body and Australia, which has rejected accusations of possible human rights breaches in a number of areas in recent weeks.
The five-member Working Group on Arbitrary Detention will be headed by a senior UN investigator, Mr Roberto Garreton, a Chilean lawyer who clashed with President Laurent Kabila of the Congo after an investigation into abuses in the former Zaire.
Mr Garreton will lead a team of three UN special rapporteurs and two interpreters on their visit due to start on May 21st, said Mr Juan Carlos Brandt, director of the UN information centre in Australia. "They will investigate arbitrary detention centres, particularly detention centres for illegal immigrants. The working group is not concerned with the conditions in the camps but the general legality of arrest and detention."
A large number of illegal immigrants, mainly from the Middle East and China, has arrived in Australia in recent months. An Australian navy patrol vessel intercepted a boat carrying 70 illegal immigrants off the remote north-west coast on Monday, the 14th vessel detained this year. More than 2,200 boat people were detected in the second half of 1999, compared with a total of 200 illegal immigrants caught in the whole of 1998.
Most illegal immigrants are held in rudimentary camps in remote areas before mandatory repatriation. Australia's main detention camp at Port Hedland, 1,300 km north of Perth, is full with about 800 immigrants. The authorities were forced to open a new centre near a former missile testing site in the desert of South Australia state last November, while another makeshift centre at an airforce base in Western Australia has also been used.
About 12 illegal immigrants from the Middle East sewed their lips together in a dramatic protest at the new camp in the Curtin airbase in Western Australia's inhospitable north-west. An independent refugee body said the men were angry that their applications for refugee status had not been processed and that they were not allowed out of detention.
Mr Brandt said the team would not look into mandatory sentencing laws in Australia, which the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, described during a visit last month as a domestic issue.
Australia's Labor opposition has urged the UN to examine whether the mandatory sentencing laws in Western Australia state and the Northern Territory breach international obligations.
AFP reports from Canberra:
Australia warned yesterday that it was considering abandoning the UN treaty system after what it considered unfair criticism last week of its treatment of indigenous rights. The warning came from the Foreign Minister, Mr Alexander Downer, who accused a UN committee of uncritically accepting claims by domestic political lobbies.
Mr Downer also accused the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) of ignoring considered reports submitted by Canberra and going beyond its mandate.
His attack followed criticism by the CERD of Australia's treatment of indigenous issues such as high rates of imprisonment of Aborigines under what it judged to be discriminatory mandatory sentencing laws in the Northern Territory.
It called on Canberra to override the Northern Territory laws which require mandatory jail sentences even for trivial theft offences and to apologise for past injustices in the treatment of Aborigines.