Join these events, demanding freedom for refugees and permanent protection.

Eyewitness from Indonesia: lift the refugee ban now

Monday 5 December, 6.30pm, Kathleen Syme library, Carlton

Facebook event.

Human rights for refugees, permanent visas now!

Sunday 11 December, 12pm, State Library

Facebook event.

RAC has called out the systemic “torture” of people held in Australian immigration detention facilities (IDFs) in a submission to a United Nations body.

We have called for an end to mandatory detention, for refugees and asylum-seekers on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea to be brought here, as well as a raft of legal changes and a Senate inquiry. RAC continues to call for all refugees to be given permanent protection.

The submission was made to the UN Subcommittee on the Prevention of Torture, outlining how the Australian government has been, and still is, breaching the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT) and its optional protocol (OPCAT).

OPCAT inspectors visited Australian IDFs and prisons in October but left the country in protest after being denied entry by NSW and Queensland.

The CAT definition of “torture” includes “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” of detainees. Our submission points to examples such as:

• 15 reported sexual assaults on children between 2012 and 2015 at the Nauru IDF
• the failure to stock a tropical infections antibiotic at the IDF on PNG’s Manus Island (closed in 2017) and the failure to ensure quick emergency medical airlifts to Australia, resulting in detainee Hamid Khazaei’s arrival, brain dead, at a Brisbane hospital in 2014
• 8000 forced transfers of onshore detainees by air (usually in handcuffs) from one IDF to another during 2017–19, an average for detainees of one such transfer every two months
• repeated refusals – by the Home Affairs department’s Australian Border Force unit (ABF) – of doctor-requested transfers of offshore detainees to Australia
• in 2019, even after the Migration Act’s “Medevac” amendments ordered such transfers, Home Affairs/ABF locked up transferees in IDFs, and continued to prevent most of them from receiving doctor-recommended specialist health care.

RAC has sent a copy of its submission to the Commonwealth Ombudsman, whose inspectors monitor CAT compliance between UN inspector visits.

To help end government breaches of human rights obligations, RAC’s recommendations include:

• enacting a Human Rights Charter
• defining “human rights” in the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 and the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act 2011 to include all applicable human rights instruments, including the Refugee Convention
• inserting – in the Object provision of the Migration Act and related Acts – wording such as “to give effect to Australia’s international obligations”, then, in Schedules to each Act, reproducing each relevant international instrument.

Read the RAC submission in full.

Read RAC’s letter regarding the submission sent to Ministers.

RAC’s Art Meets Activism art auction on Saturday 12 November was a huge success, with more than 100 attending and 90 per cent of artworks sold.

The in-person auction and online, silent auction raised more than $40,000 between them.

Refugees whose works sold received 100 per cent of the bid price. The remaining income, after expenses, will be split between the Brigidine Asylum Seeker Project (BASP) and RAC.

RAC would like to thank the artists whose generous donations of their work made the event possible, sponsors, the auctioneer and those who attended.

BASP uses donations to help feed, house and clothe refugees and asylum-seekers. RAC will use its share of the proceeds to step up the campaign for refugee freedom.

RAC Vic has protested to federal government ministers over the lack of support for the UN team investigating torture and/or degrading treatment in places of detention, under the OPCAT protocol.

Read the RAC letter here.