Monday, July 20, 2015



Impunity

What does impunity look like? This:

Not a single staff member accused of abusing a child asylum seeker at Nauru has been charged for an offence and the centre's operator cannot guarantee the safety of the detainees, a Senate inquiry has heard.

It also emerged on Monday that on-the-job staff drug testing is not conducted at Nauru, despite allegations of guards trading marijuana for sexual favours from female detainees.

Transfield Services, which runs the detention centre at Nauru, says there have been 67 child abuse allegations at the facility - 30 against staff and 37 against asylum seekers.

[...]

Transfield Services Commercial & Strategy Manager Erin O'Sullivan said of the 67 allegations, 12 were referred to police. Six staff members were dismissed, two were removed from the site and one was suspended. Ms O'Sullivan said she was not aware of a staff member being charged over any allegation.

A Transfield director, Angela Williams, could also not guarantee that the staff members had been permanently dismissed from the centre, saying they may have been reassigned to a different section or stood down pending investigation.


They also conveniently don't say how many of the referrals to police were staff and how many were refugees. But either way, this is dismal. Guards who abuse refugee kids in Australia's gulags won't be prosecuted, and the odds are good that they won't even be sacked. Instead, its people who blow the whistle on this abuse who will go to jail.

And that's modern Australia in a nutshell: where they imprison kids and abuse them for being born in the wrong country, and jail anyone who complains about it. Its absolutely sickening.