Abbott ‘lost confidence’ in rights chief after report
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Tuesday that he had lost confidence in the head of the nation’s Human Rights Commission, calling a report criticizing the detention of asylum-seeker children a “political stitch-up”.
The government-funded commission, which released the study earlier this month, said its 10-month investigation of 11 detention centers found widespread sexual assault, self-harm and severe mental disorders among children locked up.
Abbott told Parliament that the report should have been released when the previous Labor government was in power, as more children were held in detention at that time. His conservative government took office in September 2013.
“It’s absolutely crystal clear this inquiry by the president of the Human Rights Commission is a political stitch-up,” he said of commission President Gillian Triggs, a respected international lawyer. “This
Tony Abbott government has lost confidence in the president of the Human Rights Commission.”
He added: “It’s too political to have an inquiry into children in detention when there is 1,400 of them but it’s not too political to do it when the number is under 200.”
Catastrophic error
Australia has long come under international pressure over the detention of asylumseekers arriving by boat, particularly in offshore camps on the Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island and on Nauru and Manus Island in the Pacific.
The numbers of children in immigration detention peaked at 1,992 in mid-2013 under the former Labor administration, but they have been significantly reduced to several hundred since the Abbott government was elected.
Abbott’s remarks came as Attorney General George Brandis told a parliamentary hearing Triggs “fatally compromised” the organization over the report’s timing.
“By catastrophic error of judgment, she placed the commission in a position where it could no longer command the confidence of both sides of politics, or indeed my own confidence as the minister, in her political impartiality,” Brandis said.
“So I had reached the conclusion, sadly, that Professor Triggs should consider her position.”
Triggs claimed in the hearing that the government sought her resignation two weeks before the Forgotten Children report was released, but she rejected the request.
The report criticized both sides of politics for their policies toward asylum-seeker children and recommended a national inquiry be established to examine mandatory detention.
It’s absolutely crystal clear this inquiry ... is a political stitch-up.”