Saturday 27th of April 2024
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from Crikey .....

Two detainee deaths 10 years apart ... what have we learned?

Crikey intern Inga Ting writes:

ASYLUM SEEKERS, DEPARTMENT OF IMMIGRATION, IMMIGRATION DETENTION CENTRE, REFUGEE CLAIMS

The death of a 36-year-old Fiji detainee at Villawood detention centre on Monday bears disturbing similarities to the death a decade earlier of a Tongan man on the day he was due to be deported from Maribyrnong detention centre in Melbourne.

Fellow detainees say Josefa Rauluni, a fruit picker sending money home to his wife and children in Fiji who was arrested in August for overstaying his visa, leapt to his death from the roof of Villawood detention centre hours before he was due to be deported to his home country. In a letter to the NSW Ministerial Intervention Unit dated September 19 - the day before his death - he wrote: "If you want to send me to Fiji, then send my dead body."

Viliami Tanginoa died in the teeming rain on December 22, 2000 after diving head-first from atop a basketball hoop, where he had been crouched for some eight hours. Tanginoa - whom investigating coroner Lewis Byrne described in his findings as a "gentle, quiet, apparently uncomplicated man" - came to Australia on a six-month visitor's visa in 1983. He was arrested 17 years later and transferred to Maribyrnong detention centre. Four months later he was dead.

Although officials are tight-lipped about Monday's death, the similarities between the deaths are already striking. Both men died on the day of their scheduled deportation, after pleading to be allowed to remain in the country. Both men were engaged in discussions with detention centre officers for some time - Rauluni for one and a quarter hours allegedly and Tanginoa for eight hours - before leaping to their deaths.

In both cases, the threat of suicide was imminent and obvious, yet detention centre staff failed to call police or engage professional negotiators.

The adequacy of the management of the crisis by the private operator of Maribyrnong detention centre, Australian Correctional Management, that culminated in Tanginoa's death was the principle focus of the 2003 inquest. Coroner Byrne delivered a scathing appraisal of the company's handling of the situation in his findings, handed down in November that year:

"What I see is a haphazard, unmethodical, wholly inadequate approach. That in my considered view was a clear deficiency in performance... If expert negotiators had been involved I am satisfied the tragic event would have been prevented.

"Whilst the immediate cause of Mr Tanginoa's death was his own action in taking the decision... Another cause was the inaction of centre management; a failure to manage."

The "ineptitude" of ACM's approach was epitomised, he added, by the actions of the operations manager, who was seen on videotape bouncing a basketball on the court below where the desperate man was perched.

"[V]irtually the only pro-active action taken by management was to endeavour to place a ladder against the pole to facilitate Mr Tanginoa's descent and to place some mattresses on the ground in the vicinity on [sic] the base of the pole," the findings said.

Refugee advocate Sara Nathan described a similar scene at Villawood under its operator Serco, telling reporters on Monday that "SERCO officers actually put mattresses on the floor and told him to jump". She also said that "one SERCO officer climbed the ladder to try and grab him and handcuff him".

The coroner made six recommendations aimed at preventing a repeat of Tanginoa's death, including a recommendation that external facilitators be used in crisis situations. Another recommendation directs the Department of Immigration and ACM to revise their protocol "with respect to all detainees who are known to be at risk of self harm, particularly all persons who have been served with a Notice of Removal, for whom all legal avenues for immigration have been exhausted and for whom removal is imminent".

Charandev Singh, a human rights advocate and paralegal who has worked on deaths in immigration detention since 2000, has described Monday's death as a "catastrophic failure".

"I worked for three and a half years on Viliami's inquest and it's all but gone," Singh told Crikey. "There is no space where the department can say 'we don't know the consequences of what we're doing'. They know precisely. Obviously the lessons of Viliami's death have been seemingly completely unlearnt or ignored."

According to Singh, Monday's death is the 27th death in all forms of immigration detetention, including navy interceptions, since 2000. He says it is the fourth death in Australian detention by jumping from an elevated position. It is also the fourth death of a detainee at Villawood. In January 2002, Thi Hang Le, a Vietnamese national with serious mental illness, died after leaping from a second-storey balcony from which she had twice previously attempted suicide - the same day she was due to be deported.

In July 2001, Avion Gumede, a South African labourer and with a five-year-old child, hanged himself hours after arriving at Villawood. In September that year, Puongtong Simplee, who told Immigration officials she had been brought into the country as a child sex worker, died of malnutrition less than 72 hours after entering the centre.

and a lone cry .....

In the past, I have naively thought the facts would bring an end to the fear mongering - by explaining to people that we receive just a few thousand asylum seekers each year, and that they pose no threat to our way of life or sustainability. I want to explain that 99.99% of people who entered Australia last year, did so by plane; that Australia takes just 0.03% of the world's refugees and displaced people; and that there are 76 countries that take more refugees than we do, based on wealth.

These days, I talk about a much simpler truth: the moral responsibilities that come with living in a free and democratic country, and what it means to be an Australian. This means we have a moral duty to act and show compassion to vulnerable, innocent people who are fleeing for their lives.

- Founder of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Kon Karapanagiotidis

It has been argued that the real reason the detention of asylum seekers remains solidly bi-partisan is not about the need for timely processing and administration concerns. It's about how it looks. Talking tough, and looking tough, by processing asylum seekers behind an impenetrable fence - here and offshore.

So how does it look, for the government, for the private contractor Serco, for the Immigration Department, for a country's human rights reputation, when a man jumps to his death on our watch?

That all depends on whether anyone cares. As Karapanagiotidis points out - and has, again and again over the years - stats don't seem to budge public opinion. But what about desperate people doing desperate things? Will that kind of story ignite our "moral duty to act and show compassion", or will it simply be dismissed as another headline?

Ultimately it's up to the public to let the government of the day know, in no uncertain terms, this kind of thing is unacceptable. Whether they will is another matter entirely...

death by numbers .....

from Crikey .....

Immigration detention: 27 dead and (not) counting...

Crikey intern Inga Ting writes:

ASYLUM SEEKERS, DEATHS IN CUSTODY, DETENTION CENTRES

Up to 27 people have died in immigration custody since 2000 yet none of these deaths are recorded by the national deaths in custody monitoring program, despite clearly meeting the legal definition, according to a human rights advocate and paralegal with more than 10 years' experience working on deaths in immigration detention.

"If you apply the law around what constitutes custody, which flows from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and other legal test cases, then there is no dispute that these are deaths in custody. There are deaths in Commonwealth custody," Charandev Singh said.

Singh said the inclusion of these deaths in the Australian Institute of Criminology's National Deaths in Custody Program was about accuracy and integrity.

"It's [about] telling the true story about the full extent of deaths in custody in our country ... There's a death in custody in this country every less than five days. There have been four deaths in custody in the last week alone, including this death in detention. It makes no sense whatsoever to exclude them or be secret about them," Singh said.

"These are real deaths. They're a consequence of our policies and the legal conditions operating in our detention centres ... Until people know what's happening, they just don't believe it. They don't have to deal with it."

Singh has recorded 27 deaths in all forms of immigration detention, including Navy interceptions, since 2000. Between 1991 and 2000, there was only one death in custody, Singh said.

"There's never been a national investigation or a national analysis of deaths in immigration detention, despite the extraordinary increase in the number of deaths in custody in the last 10 years," he said.

"That really undermines any capacity to understand deaths in detention in the context of our mandatory detention policy."

The Department of Immigration and Citizenship has refused to release its own figures on the number of deaths in immigration detention further back than the past five years, in which it says three people have died in detention centres, including the death on Monday of Fiji man Josefa Rauluni at Villawood.

Asked whether it believed immigration centre deaths should be included in the national count of deaths in custody, the department told Crikey: "The Australian Institute of Criminology performs a research function for government. It's a matter for the AIC to determine what statistics are relevant to a particular piece of research."

An AIC spokesperson confirmed to Crikey that deaths in immigration detention are not included in the national tally of deaths in custody. He said the question of whether or not deaths that occur in immigration detention should be included in the program was "a matter for government".

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen was unavailable for comment.

Meanwhile, as government agency deflects to government agency, it seems the states and territories have been treating detention centre deaths as deaths in custody for years - in some jurisdictions, for more than a decade. The Coroners Act in every jurisdiction except Western Australia categorises immigration detention deaths as deaths in custody, which means they are reported, investigated and recorded as such. As with all deaths in custody, inquests into immigration centre deaths are mandatory in these jurisdictions.

It would seem, then, that the information is out there and being collected; it's simply not being counted by the country's peak monitoring body for deaths in custody.

"The terms of reference that came out of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody for us were such that we look at deaths in custody as a result of people incarcerated under the criminal law. No consideration was ever given to us looking at people detained under immigration law and our reporting on deaths in custody has been on that basis ever since," an AIC spokesman told Crikey.

The commission delivered its final report in 1991. Mandatory immigration detention was introduced the following year.

A recognition of immigration detention deaths as deaths in custody may also have repercussions for the care and treatment of detainees, which was a primary focus of the Royal Commission. Its final report set out the legal duty of care owed to people in custody. It dedicated 46 of its 339 recommendations - the most recommendations for any single area - to the improvement of custodial health and safety.The Department of Immigration and Citizenship told Crikey that it had considered the Royal Commission recommendations when setting out the obligations and duty of care owed by private contractor Serco towards people in detention.

"Yes, the Department takes into account a broad range of information sources when considering detention health policy," a department spokesman said.

"All people in immigration detention are provided with access to a range of healthcare services, including mental health support, commensurate to those available in the broader Australian community."

However, clinical psychologist Jeanette Gibson - who has worked in prisons and immigration detention centres - said on Wednesday that she believes prisoners are treated more humanely than asylum seekers.

Refugee advocate Sara Nathan told Crikey the healthcare and mental health services at Villawood were "very minimal". One man who had been in detention for a year had only had counselling once, she said, while another was filing a complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission because he had yet to receive treatment for shrapnel lodged in his leg, despite repeated requests.

Executive director of the Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre David Manne said such breaches of duty of care may well expose the government and its private contractors to legal action.

"It's crystal clear under Australian law that the government has a non-delegable duty of care towards people in detention, so while it can contract a private company to run the centre, it can't contract out of its obligations to people it decides to detain," Manne said, adding that he was not making comment on any specific case.

The federal government has paid $5.4 million in compensation to asylum seekers for injuries suffered in detention. More than 50 payments were made in the past two years. The Department of Immigration refused to confirm how many cases, if any, have been to court, saying only that "the majority were settled out of court".

electoral caprice .....

It simply goes to prove, in a stark demonstration of electoral caprice, that the recent federal election was fought, largely, around a big fat lie - that Australia was at risk of being swamped by boat people. Again.

It's no wonder that there is some deep soul searching going on in the Labor Party at present. Much of it is about how it approached this issue during the election in response to the Coalition's well-worn dog whistle. Greg Combet called it for what it is last week when he suggested the values of compassion, equity and social justice had been abandoned in favour of focus groups and polling.

And so it is with this deliberately confused debate around immigration, population and illegal entrants and the push polling of fear that has driven it.

Its effect has been a wilful distortion which encourages the issue of illegal entrants to be confused and demonised in the community as an excuse for failures to deal with the broader discussion on immigration levels and population numbers, which neither side of politics has an answer for.

Yesterday, the Sunday papers warned that we have hit record high numbers of people arriving by boat, although the figure is only marginally higher than it was in 2001.

Julia Gillard was right when she said it would take 20 years to fill the MCG with asylum seekers as they arrive at their current rate to Australia.

More backpackers are in this country illegally than people who arrive by boat.

But what she failed to do - and still fails to do - is clearly articulate the issue as not one about a bigger Australia and immigration levels but one that has distinct and separate obligations, which we as a country have signed up to.

Boat People Victim Of A Big Fat Lie

hardly something you'd expect to find in mad Rupert's Daily Terra .......

lest we forget .....

Ask yourself and others a quick quiz. What was the Coniston massacre? Who boasted of having killed 31 people in Australia? What is William George Murray, also known as George William Murray, remembered for? The appalling truth is that for most of us Murray isn't remembered for anything, yet it was he who boasted of killing 31 people and the true figure is probably much higher.

Many people reading this will never have heard of the Coniston Massacre. I hadn't until I met someone who had been affected by it, Rhubee Neale, who comes from Alice Springs and describes herself as a beautiful mixture of Arrernte, Anmatyerre, Kaytetye and Irish stock. "It wasn't centuries ago," she said. "It was in 1928."

In 1928, the area around Coniston station was the most western outpost of pastoral expansion in Central Australia. There had been a terrible four-year drought with white men and thirsty cattle competing for resources with Indigenous people. In 1928 George William Murray, also known as William George Murray, was in charge of the Barrow Creek police station and ironically had the title of Chief Protector of Aborigines.

Gallipoli is seared on our psyche and part of our national brand and we like to think of our Gallipoli veterans as national heroes but the little-known reality is that one veteran, Murray, returned and used the techniques he'd learned with the Light Horse brigade against the first Australians. This became the largely forgotten Coniston massacre.

We think of a massacre as being a single terrible event but actually the Coniston massacre is a collective name for a series of killings that took place at different locations, scattered over a wide area of inland Australia, over a period of weeks. In the company of other men armed with rifles and pistols, he rode into camps, dismounted from his horse and started shooting. Murray used a Lee-Enfield .303 which held a magazine of ten rounds and had a rapid fire rate. The Aboriginal people, defending their camps and their lives with spears and boomerangs, had no chance.

Lest we forget: The Coniston Massacre