Mission & Justice

Patricia Karvelas; 27/8/08

“Mother, I miss you so much.” With these words 14-year-old indigenous girl Sianna Eland reduced Therese Rein to tears. The Prime Minister’s wife had offered to help out Sianna, one of 21 students invited to The Lodge in Canberra yesterday, to read her work and launch the National Indigenous Literacy Project. In a room packed with high-profile authors including David Malouf and Kate Grenville, Sianna, from the Melba Copland Secondary School in Canberra, had been too shy to read her own poem and Ms Rein had risen to support her. “This is going to make me cry,” Ms Rein warned. And as she read Sianna’s words about the loss of her mother seven years ago, her tears flowed.

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Paul Toohey; 27/8/08

In a decision that will send tremors through town camps and bush communities, fringe dweller Ronald Djana yesterday received the longest non-parole sentence ever handed down to an Aboriginal murderer in the Northern Territory. Djana, 32, will serve a minimum 27 years for the murder of Janie Norman after Alice Springs Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers told the judge that his history of brutalising his wife had earned him more than the 25 years he was already facing.  Supreme Court judge Dean Mildren agreed. His sentence makes it clear courts and prosecutors will no longer treat Aboriginal men as a special class of offender and is one of the strongest statements in the defence of beaten Aboriginal women in the Territory’s history.

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Editorial: 27/8/08

There have been several cases reported recently of young girls, some as young as seven or eight, being married off by their parents to men in their 50s, 60s or even older. In some instances, parents are literally selling their daughters to older men purely for financial reasons —- to settle debts or to gain a substantial dowry for their own use. The practice is repugnant. Young girls are being treated as potential sex slaves, commodities to be bought and sold at whim to satisfy the lusts of old men. It has to be stopped. The Grand Mufti has spoken against it and so too has the Saudi Human Rights Commission (HRC). Only this week, the head of the commission, Turki Al-Sudairi, called on the Saudi authorities to put an end to these marriages. There are several issues at stake in what is incontestably a human rights violation.

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Nasser Arrabyee; 27/8/08

About 600,000 children do hazardous work in Yemen, said a report prepared by the child parliament in cooperation with Unicef and the Swedish organisation, Save Children.The report said that the hazardous work includes carrying stones, carpentry and car repair workshops. The reasons behind such practices are poverty, family break-ups and failed marriages, said the report that called for finding solutions for the child labour.

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Roni Singer-Heruti; 27/8/08

Police believe that 4-year-old Rose Pizem was killed by her paternal grandfather, Ronny Ron, who is also the live-in lover of her mother, Marie-Charlotte Renault. Both Ron and Renault were remanded for another eight days on Tuesday, and the court also lifted the strict gag order that had been imposed on the case until now. Ron, a 45-year-old resident of Netanya, confessed to the murder earlier this week, police said. He also brought them to the spot where he allegedly threw Rose into the Yarkon River after stuffing her body into a suitcase.

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26/8/08

A month-old law in the US state of Nebraska which allows babies and children up to the age of 19 to be abandoned without their parents’ knowledge has been slammed by a lawmaker and children’s rights group. The law “creates far more problems than it will ever solve, and it leaves the underlying problem untouched,” said Ernie Chambers, the only lawmaker in the Nebraska state legislature to vote against the bill. “I do not believe that a woman - young, middle-aged or old - just on a whim says ‘I think I’ll give up my baby’,” Mr Chambers said. The law, which took effect on July 18, says: “No person shall be prosecuted for any crime based solely upon the act of leaving a child in the custody of an employee on duty at a hospital licensed by the state of Nebraska.”

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Siobhain Ryan & Sean Parnell; 26/8/08

When Julia Rollings first heard that the orphanage from which she had adopted her son and daughter was embroiled in a child-trafficking scandal, she was faced with a life-changing choice. She could do nothing, safe in the knowledge that her children, Akil and Sabila, had been declared free for adoption by Indian courts, were Australian citizens and were in a place they called home. Or she could find out for sure whether the story she was told - that Akil and Sabila’s parents had voluntarily relinquished them because of ill-health - was true. Two years ago, Mrs Rollings chose the truth, and the truth hurt. An Indian friend she commissioned to look into Akil and Sabila’s background found they had been sold by their drunk and violent father to the Madras Social Service Guild orphanage for $50 without their mother Sunama’s knowledge or consent.

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Caroline Overington; 25/8/08

Victoria moved this week to legalise abortion, a development that frankly surprised many people. Isn’t abortion legal, and hasn’t it been for years? As it happens, no. In Australia’s three most populous states - Victoria, NSW and Queensland - abortion is a crime. That is to say, it is part of the Crimes Act, and has been for more than 150 years. Women in all states and the Northern Territory can get a legal abortion, but only if a doctor agrees that the woman will come to some kind of ill-defined physical, social or mental harm if she continues with the pregnancy. Only in the ACT is abortion available on demand. That is, to any woman who wants one, pretty much on request. That, at least, is the law. Now the practice: there are about 83,000 abortions a year in Australia and many are subsidised by Medicare. It is claimed that one in three Australian women will have an abortion in their lifetime (figures are ill-defined, since data is rarely kept).

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Stuart Rintoul; 25/8/08

Colleen Murray has seen the power of intervention in the lives of Aboriginal children. And she has seen the damage done by parents who have no expectations of their children. Ms Murray is the executive officer of the Tirkandi Inaburra Cultural and Development Centre, an early intervention unit for indigenous boys aged between 12 and 15 who are at risk of becoming caught up in the criminal justice system. Based on an intensive boarding school-type environment and operating in southern NSW for the past two years, the program is designed to strengthen the self-esteem and living skills of Aboriginal boys, as well as their literacy and numeracy skills, in an effort to keep them out of jail. The centre has been short-listed in this year’s Indigenous Governance Awards, which highlight what is working in Aboriginal Australia, rather than what is not.

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Andra Jackson; 25/8/08

Two peace ships organised by a Melbourne man, Michael Shaik, have broken through Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. The ships, the SS Free Gaza and the SS Liberty, set out from Cyprus on Friday with dozens of human rights activists from around the world, carrying children’s hearing aids to the Palestinian territory. Two years of planning went into running the blockade after Mr Shaik came up with the idea of challenging Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement and access to basic services. Israel, with US backing and Egyptian help, has controlled entry and exit from Gaza since its withdrawal in 2005, but virtually sealed off its 1.5 million people last summer after the militant Islamists Hamas put down a Fatah coup attempt.

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