this is disgusting....Fucking john coward
Violence against women and the deprivation of Aborigines have been cited as blots on Australia's human rights record by Amnesty International.
In its global report for 2006, the human rights watchdog also identified treatment of asylum seekers, the Howard government's restriction of civil liberties under counter-terrorism laws and the treatment of David Hicks as issues that needed addressing.
The London-based Amnesty said violence against women in Australia was unacceptably high.
It attacked the government's failure to provide budget funding for programs to address the problem, with almost half of all women seeking shelter from violence being turned away because of lack of resources.
Addressing the issue of Aborigines, the 2006 Amnesty report cited an Australian Productivity Commission report that found indigenous Australians were 11 times more likely to be imprisoned and had a life expectancy around 17 years less than non-indigenous Australians.
It was also keeping a watching brief on the ongoing inquest into the death of Cameron Doomadgee in custody on Palm Island in 2004.
On asylum seekers and refugees, Amnesty described policy changes in response to the Cornelia Rau and Vivien Solon cases as positive, but those gains were being counteracted by proposed laws to send unannounced asylum seekers to "remote and isolated locations".
Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said the Australian immigration policy undermined improvements to the treatment of asylum seekers throughout 2005.
Under the changes, all asylum seekers landing on the mainland will be sent for processing to offshore detention centres in Nauru or Papua New Guinea's Manus Island, with Ms Khan saying it risked putting them "in limbo forever".
She said the government "also placed the lives of Australians in jeopardy by failing to adopt a consistent and principled position against the death penalty".
"This led to the government undermining its own credibility when seeking to intervene on behalf of Australians, such as Van Tuong Nguyen, who was executed in Singapore" last December."
The report attacked the Howard anti-terror laws, such as preventative detention in secret for 14 days without charge or trial, and renewable control orders for up to 12 months.
"The latter could severely constrain freedom of movement and association and could limit employment and communications," it said, adding that freedom of speech was limited by new sedition laws.
On Hicks, Amnesty said the government had "failed to meet international standards" in that it attached legitimacy to Guantanamo Bay detention and the US military commission hearings.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=102938 Current Mood: 
angry 
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