HRA MEDIA RELEASE: CHOGM, a welcome mat to brutal human rights abusers.

HRA MEDIA RELEASE: CHOGM a welcome mat to brutal human rights abusers.

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth during the last week of October will welcome various brutal human rights abusers. The capacity for the discovery of the truth is outstripped by the manifest of deceit.

The Commonwealth of Australia as it degenerates into its own ugly cascade of human rights violations and outright abuses for instance the incarceration of 100 of the world's most impoverished children in Australian Adult Prisons, the clandestine Mandatory Detention Network which has taken six lives, five by suicide, in the last eleven months, with more to occur post-release as the induced traumas tragically play out, with Australia's separation and neglect of Aboriginal peoples, will be very much in likewise company during CHOGM.

Australia cannot criticise others when it haunts the Australian landscape with a myriad of ugly human rights abuses, and when it consigns itself to open discrimination and racism.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard will be in the company of Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Australia will respect an individual who led a country where its Army in 2009 shelled hospitals and held back humanitarian aid to people. The shelling and fire by the army killed tens of thousands of civilians. The Sri Lankan landscape is littered with security forces arbitrarily killing people, unlawful killings. People to this day live in abject and acute persecution.

Gambia's Yahya Jammeh is another low profile dictator with high profile abuses - The abduction of citizens and the torture of political prisoners are the culmination of a country where freedom of speech is denied, and violence and lawlessness rebuke community prospects.

Cameroon's President Paul Biya, from 1982 onwards, is supported by his security forces who when they deem it necessary arbitrarily kill, literally, political dissent. Corruption is rife.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who hung by a whisker to gain the Prime Ministership, will be entertaining dictators long accused of electoral frauds, of recurring rigging of elections such as Paul Biya and such as Kenya's Mwai Kibaki. Unlawful killings, detention and judicial corruption are a concern about Kenya to just about every Human Rights Watch Committee. Yet, here we have a significant number of the Commonwealth's dictators, murderers, and corrupt welcomed with the red carpet while our homeless folk are shoved out of our city centres.

These are only a few examples of international human rights abusers coming to enjoy some camaraderie with Australia which is now doing its best to scrub up as a human rights abuser as I reiterate once again that Australia knowingly imprisons impoverished children in adult jails, slapping indefinite detention and tortuous mental and physical conditions upon our Asylum Seekers, be they children, women and men, committing every known racism upon the most vulnerable of our Aboriginal peoples.

CHOGM Australia is symbolised by the disgraceful treatment of our homeless - shoved from the city squats and traps they sleep through in the darkest of nights, coldest of winters, sharpest of winds and chilliest of rains. Instead of the promise of accommodation that could be transformed into semi permanent accommodation the media spin from the Government is that there'll be "a night's" worth of 'hostel accommodation', however there'll be no extra beds, just services available from those organisations already there! - and then back to their dank squats. CHOGM Australia could have refused VISA Entry to Australia of all the human rights abusers who masquarade as Heads and Delegates of Governments and instead allocated money to be spent on entertaining and accommodating human rights abusers in accommodating and assisting our homeless folk.

If you wish to know a nation's identity, its heart and mind, then day and night look into the make up of its prisons, and in the chill of the darkest night, walk its streets and do not turn your eyes away from the homeless, who when you see them at long last are many, many, many more than you first thought.

Rally for Perth's homeless folk, the streeties, during July at State Parliament.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wp3F9_LBJc&feature=channel_video_title

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI2SbHzwAs8&feature=related

Police Minister Rob Johnson speaking to Perth's homeless folk when he made 'promises' now broken.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wp3F9_LBJc

Gerry Georgatos
Convener, Human Rights Alliance
PhD Law Researcher, Australian Deaths in Custody

0430 657 309
gerry_georgatos@yahoo.com.au