Aborigines: Australia criticized by the UN Human Rights Council
Australian Aboriginal (illustrative image).
AFP PHOTO / Anoek DE GROOT
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
The complicated relations between Australia and the aboriginal community are on the menu of the UN Human Rights Council this Wednesday, January 20.
Like every five years, the Council will carry out in the morning what it calls a “universal periodic review” of the situation of human rights in Australia.
A moment that promises to be quite unpleasant for government officials in Canberra, criticized in particular for the discrimination suffered by the aborigines, who are very largely over-represented within the Australian prison population.
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With our correspondent in Sidney,
Grégory Plesse
How is it that one in three prisoners is aboriginal, when the Aborigines represent only one in thirty inhabitants in Australia?
These are the kinds of questions that the UN Human Rights Council will ask the Australian government today, whose record in this area has hardly changed since the last review in 2015.
Age of criminal responsibility
The other annoying subject is that of the age of criminal responsibility.
Currently, in Australia, it is set at ten years, and not fourteen, as previously recommended by the United Nations.
Again, it is the Aborigines who pay the price for this policy.
They represent between 50% and 60% of minors in detention.
The risk for Aboriginal minors of ending up in prison is also twenty times higher than for the rest of the population.
"Closing the Gap"
In its defense, Australia argues that it has made progress on other issues, such as domestic violence, or the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2017. On the aboriginal issue, however, the inequalities remain glaring.
Since 2008, the government has set itself a series of targets under a program called “Closing the Gap”.
By 2020, only two of the sixteen goals had been achieved.
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