HUMAN RIGHTS FOR EACH PERSON REGARDLESS OF AGE, RACE, RELIGION OR POLITICS
HOME | PRISONERS & PRISONS | EXPERIENCES | BOOKS & PRODUCTS | HOW YOU CAN HELP | LATEST NEWS | EMAIL
LATEST NEWS
Australia's Guantanamo?
Kerry Smith - 24 November 2006

A visit by US officials has raised fears on Christmas Island that an immigration detention centre could be turned into a Guantanamo-style prison, the November 17 Melbourne Age reported.

Christmas Island is 2400 kilometres from Perth, 360km from Jakarta and nearly 2000km from Darwin. The federal government is spending $240 million on the new detention centre.

A group of about six [US defence officials] arrived by American plane and left on a commercial flight a week later & they took photos, and prepared a report for their masters in Washington, Christmas Island shire president Gordon Thomson told the Age.

The guys who came here were part of the military machine, one of them gave me a card which said he was based in Virginia and that is where the CIA is. They were looking at a Guantanamo style prison.

Thomson said the US officials had studied Christmas Islands port, airport and hospital. They said that they were here to make a report because they dont want to be caught flat footed in the event US assets are engaged in a humanitarian mission.

Thomson said most of the islands inhabitants were opposed to the detention centre. We dont want a prison on Christmas Island at all, we dont want a prison for refugees anywhere.

The detention centre includes possible solitary confinement cells, Thomson said.

A defence department spokesperson said the visiting US officials were a military survey team, not CIA officers as Thomson suggested.

In a November 16 media release, refugee-rights activist Pamela Curr stated that the detention centre will have electrified fences and microwave probes (movement detectors) similar to those at South Australias Baxter immigration detention centre, but also hundreds of different camera systems, posted under eaves, on roofs and in every room.

It will have CCTV linked to a remote-control room in Canberra.

She said there would be cameras and microphones in every room, wall mounted behind heavy metal grilles. The doors to the rooms will be electronically opened and closed.

Microwave probes will surround every building as well as the layers of perimeter fences encircling the centre. Access by car goes through airlock systems and electric doors, and between the multi-layered fence system there will be checkpoints for human guards on patrol and outdoor security cubicles for them to sit, sited at short intervals all around the perimeter of the centre.

Each of these security cubicles is to be wired with duress buttons and microwave probes.

Curr said: Those of us who have witnessed the disintegration of the human spirit in Baxter can only shudder at the impact this will have on whom ever is selected for incarceration in this place. Baxter is weeks away from closure bringing to an end the isolated detention camps of Curtin, Port Hedland, Woomera and now Baxter.

We will not forget the management units, isolation cells, punishment regimes, water canon, capsicum spray, baton charges, bashings and brutality unleashed in these places without scrutiny under [former immigration minister Philip] Ruddock. We must not let this government and the supine opposition build this even worse gulag out in the Indian Ocean far from scrutiny, beyond the reach of law and justice.

Curr question why this new prison was being built. Only 153 people have arrived by boat to Australia or an offshore island since December 2001. Yet, here we have a government with a contingency plan of an 800-bed prison on the off chance that someone may come.

Considering that they have no contingency plan for our future water supplies, our starving public hospitals and health system and our disintegrating public schools and universities not to mention desperate skills shortage, it does not make sense.

We do not know for whom this hellhole is being built but we do know that whoever is incarcerated there will suffer in body and spirit. They will be deprived of their human rights and will have no access to Australian legal rights.

The recently signed Indonesia-Australia security treaty is very worrying. Will West Papuans be interred in this gulag?

We know that the people left on Nauru were eventually removed because they became so sick and depressed that their very survival could not be assured.

In this place human beings will be under intense electronic surveillance and God knows what else. Refugee advocates and lawyers will have no access unless the government allows it. Christmas Island is a distant and expensive plane trip from Australia. There are no lawyers on the island.
CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO THE NEWS PAGE
FREEDOM IS A RIGHT OF ALL HUMAN BEINGS IN A WORLD WHERE LIFE IS VALUED AND PEACE MAY FINALLY BE A POSSIBILITY
*
MAKE A DONATION
*
TELL A FRIEND
*
HOME | PRISONERS & PRISONS | EXPERIENCES | BOOKS & PRODUCTS | HOW YOU CAN HELP | LATEST NEWS | EMAIL
Just in case you forgot - read the Universal declaration of Human Rights
Copyright - An important message to website owners:
All information at this site is © Copyright 1996 - 2005 'Save-A-Life' & 'Foreign Prisoner Support Service' unless stated otherwise. As with all our information AND more specifically, information relating to CAMPAIGNS AND/OR PRISONERS we have been granted special permission to disclose this type of information by the families and/or by the detainee themselves. Therefore, if you wish to use any of this information to re-create in your own website or elsewhere, please contact us - save breach of copyright. News stories are reprinted for archival, news reporting and information use only and are credit where possible.
Click here for the legal stuff