Australia

The Human Rights Alliance Media Release:

19.7.2011

Overnight the Christmas Island Detention Centre roof protest escalated with the response a severe lockdown. Christmas Island Detention Centre is now as bad as Woomera and Baxter. UN Observers must be located in these unlawful Detention Centres.

The Christmas Island roof top protest unnecessarily escalated and once again there was no appropriate de-escalation, mitigation or humanity.

An impoverished Indonesian mother, in front of an Australian journalist, lies on a cement floor clutching a photograph of her 16 year old son who is now in an Australian adult prison and whom she hasn't seen since he was fourteen. Abject and acute poverty ravages Indonesia, a country where only 10% of the population has a refrigerator, where most people do not have electricity let alone a television, where many people live half lives working in sulphur mines and where most folk will never rise out of the shanty towns and villages they are born to die in.

The Human Rights Alliance: Deaths in Custody: Australia's horrific record - The Australian Senate lets us down. Motion is an insult.

The Australian Senate approved the Greens Motion to acknowledge the rising Aboriginal incarceration rates and deaths in custody in lieu of Friday 15, April which marks twenty years since the release of the 339 recommendations and Final Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.