RIGHTS-AUSTRALIA: Aboriginal Deaths in Custody on the Rise

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ilana Eldridge

DARWIN, Australia, Dec 17 2004 (IPS) - The recent death of a young indigenous Australian in a prison cell in Palm Island, in the northeastern state of Queensland, has sparked renewed calls for the recommendations of a Royal Commission to be implemented in order to prevent large numbers of Aboriginals from dying in jails and detention centers.

Cameron Doomadgee died almost a month ago in the police watch house after suffering four broken ribs and a ruptured liver. His death became a catalyst for dramatic and violent riots and the torching of both the police station and the court on Palm Island as well as large street demonstrations in Queensland’s capital, Brisbane.

Aboriginal activist Murrandoo Yanner said Doomadgee who was found dead on Nov. 19 suffered head injuries so severe he was unrecognisable.

”His jaw was swollen and disfigured and there was a heel-size lump of skin off his forehead,” he told reporters. ”I can tell you, the brother was unrecognisable.”

Yanner said he saw the injuries, which he added were consistent with being bashed, as he helped prepare his cousin’s body for his funeral last Saturday.

Queensland police initially said Doomadgee injured himself from a fall on to the steps outside the watch house. A coroner’s inquest into the Aboriginal youth’s death will be held early next year.

Statistics indicate that indigenous people make up only two percent of the Australian population of 20.2 million, but 20 percent of the prison population is Aboriginal. They also face an incarceration rate 12 times higher than for non-indigenous Australians.

Between 1990 and 2000, indigenous people accounted for 18 percent of all deaths in custody. And official figures indicate that since 1990, around 200 Aboriginal people have died in custody. The largest number in any one year was 21 deaths in 1995.

The Royal Commission’s findings, published in 1991, were widely considered to be a blueprint for indigenous reform. While most of its recommendations were accepted for implementation by both state and federal governments, subsequent reviews by the Royal Commission have found that a key problem for Australia’s indigenous people has been the lack of political will in the implementation of the recommendations, coupled with more punitive approaches on law and order issues in many Australian states and territories.

Pat Dodson, principal author of the Royal Commission report, concluded that indigenous deaths in custody were largely as a result of the over-representation of Aboriginals in jails and that the most significant reasons for this was their disadvantaged and unequal position within the wider community.

Dodson concluded that this disadvantage ”could only be alleviated through empowerment, self-determination and reconciliation.”

Nonetheless, there has been some reform. Conditions in many prisons have improved, as has the awareness by custodial and medical staff of issues concerning the proper treatment of prisoners. There’s been a greater commitment to cross-cultural training for police, the judiciary and other criminal justice staff and a growth in indigenous community-based initiatives including indigenous street patrols at night, cell visitor schemes and indigenous-run community programmes for offenders.

But still, the deaths continue.

Les Malezer, from the Queensland-based Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action, said Australian governments have adopted the easier recommendations of the Royal Commission about improving custodial care but failed to address successfully the causes of indigenous poverty, alcoholism and ill-health.

”Australia is actually going backwards or is forgetting the commitments it has made,” he told the ‘Australian Broadcasting Corporation’ TV.

Indeed Palm Island, where Doomadgee came from, is a testimony to that.

Criminologist Prof. Paul Wilson from Queensland’s Bond University, who has closely studied the island, said its current problems were caused by repression of the past.

”The history of how white colonisers have treated black people on this island is appalling and we are seeing now the result of that legacy,” he said. ”The rates of violence on Palm Island are among the highest in Australia.”

The largest concentration of indigenous people is in Australia’s Northern Territory, where they make up more than 30 percent of the population.

”Within 20 years, Aboriginal people will be more than 50 percent of the population of the Northern Territory. If these people are not engaged in the local economy it will not be sustainable in the long-term,” Matthew O’Reilly, project officer with the Murwangi Community Aboriginal Corporation which facilitates indigenous involvement in small business, told IPS.

Indigenous people are united in their agreement that the main issue for their physical and cultural survival is access to their traditional lands. And that was put bluntly by Tibby Quall, elder of the Dangalaba clan of the Kulumbiringin people, whose land includes Darwin, the Northern Territory’s capital.

”It’s still a genocide. By extinguishing native title, you extinguish people’s culture that effectively leads to genocide. The Australian government doesn’t recognise our basic human rights,” he said in an interview.

The Native Title Act of 1993, superseded the Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) of 1976, and made it virtually impossible for indigenous people to complete claims to their traditional lands, thereby hindering their traditional ownership.

State and federal governments have and continue to strenuously oppose, often successfully, all claims to land under the previous Land Rights Act.. Current Australian common law, under the existing Native Title Act, virtually extinguishes all native title rights and interests.

”If in the courts you don’t win, then the ruling of the courts effectively extinguishes your culture forever,” said Quall.

In calling for support from the international community, Quall said Australia needed its own South Africa-like truth and reconciliation commission.

”Indigenous Australians, too, need reconciliation – a process to address the terrible reality of the situation, to tell the stories, to stop the genocide and to devise a way forward, therefore, healing, a massive and suppurating sore in the body of Australia,” he stressed. ”We cannot move forward as a nation until we have addressed this issue.”