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	Farewell to Freedom by AAP / The Age & agencies Australia   October 28, 2005   New Anti-Terror law threatens human rights". (AAP)   The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) says human rights are not protected under the federal government"s anti-terrorism bill.   Commission president John von Doussa, QC, has stressed the need to stop and consider the practical implications of the bill, and the context in which it will operate, before it is passed as law.   "What concerns me most about the current version of the anti-terrorism bill is what happens after a person is first detained or served with a control order and their liberty is restricted," Mr von Doussa said in a statement. "International human rights law requires that a person who is detained must have the right to challenge this detention in a court without delay," he said.   He said review before the court needed to include: consideration of whether the order is based on a correct understanding of the facts; whether the detention is fair; whether it is reasonably necessary in the circumstances; and whether it is proportionate to the goal of protecting national security. "The current form of the bill simply fails to meet these basic guarantees".   He was also concerned that people wrongly detained may not have the opportunity to contest their detention on the basis that authorities got it wrong. "All they can do is seek judicial review before the federal court or high court...a form of review that is very limited and confined to technical legal grounds.   "In my view, the absence of the right to adequate review is the major human rights weakness in the current draft of the legislation."   "On top of this, the current bill would place significant restrictions on a detained person"s ability to contact other people. He said all that a detained person"s family or employer would receive is a fax stating that they were safe but unable to be contacted at the moment. "What would one"s spouse or employer think if a message like this was received?"   He has acknowledged that the government could and should make tougher security laws in a time of heightened concern about terrorism. But he said: "We need to debate the bill with these practical considerations in mind and require the time to do so."   A former chief justice of the Australian High Court has joined two former prime ministers, Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, in expressing concerns about the new counter-terrorism laws.   "Laws impairing rights and freedoms cannot be justified unless they are shown to be needed to target an identifiable, present danger to the community," former chief justice Sir Gerard Brennan said in a statement yesterday.   "A legislature should not attempt to bring in such laws until the community has had an opportunity to examine their terms and decide on their purpose and effect." Another former chief justice, Sir Anthony Mason, said recently that adequate time must be allowed for debate.   Yesterday Mr Whitlam said the proposals would allow for Australians to be "interned" and then face criminal charges if they spoke to their families or employers about their detention. He accused the Federal Government of using fear as an election winner and lamented the fact that Labor had not joined in opposing the proposed laws.   Last week Mr Fraser said the laws should be opposed because the secretive process to introduce them was seriously flawed. Yesterday Elizabeth Evatt, former chief justice of the Family Court, said she was stunned that the Government would contemplate the proposals for preventive detention and control orders.   Oct 2005   Anti-terrorist laws are undermining the foundations of our democracy, writes Alastair Nicholson. (The Age)   Our liberties and our democracy are under a more serious threat than that posed by terrorists as a direct result of the reaction of our leaders, the media and, in turn, the public, to that threat.   We have experienced a complete failure of political leadership on both sides of politics that has led to a lemming-like rush by the two major political parties to outdo each other in proposing more and more extreme legislation directed at combating a threat of terrorism in this country.   In the name of security, in circumstances reminiscent of the works of Joseph Heller and George Orwell, the public is prevented from knowing the evidentiary basis that justifies such powers. This is the case with new legislation and also, as US activist Scott Parkin discovered, where the powers are applied to an individual.   Absent the death penalty and the official approval of torture, loss of individual liberty is the most extreme sanction that can be inflicted by the state on our autonomy and integrity. Historically, our legal systems and institutions reflected this fact and the concept of the "liberty of the subject" is one of the cherished doctrines of the common law. Indeed, the capricious use of detention often lay at the heart of popular portrayals of totalitarian regimes in contradistinction to ours. Now, in a society where democratic virtues are hailed as the foundation of our personal freedoms, we seem to have come to accept the legitimacy of the extended use of incarceration, one that could have perilous, ever-increasing application.   I do not for a moment suggest that we do not need ASIO or other intelligence-gathering organisations, nor do I suggest that they should not be properly empowered to carry out their functions. The important question is what is a proper empowerment. It is simply not good enough for the Government to assert the need for a power without justifying it as the Federal Government and the Premiers seek to do.   The present powers conferred on ASIO are extensive and represent a considerable invasion of civil liberties. The fact that they have apparently been exercised sparingly to date, while commendable, is no answer. The fact is that police powers of this type are always open to the possibility of abuse..   The checks and balances that it is suggested should be included are laughable. The present ASIO legislation in relation to terrorism had a sunset clause of three years and yet the premiers apparently regarded it as something of a victory that they obtained agreement to a 10-year sunset clause in relation to the new legislation.   The provision for judicial review is no more than window-dressing. It is a meaningless safeguard because the judge or magistrate concerned has no way of testing what is produced by the authorities. Any judge who has had experience of authorising telephone tapping or the use of listening devices can testify that this is no safeguard and that the judge is little more than a rubber stamp.   It is for this reason that most federal judges now refuse to have any part in authorising such applications. The proposed legislation will provide nothing better and the provision for judicial review is included largely to create a false impression of due process.   The second problem about this sort of legislation is that it is likely to lead to a situation where Government and its agencies will use it for other and improper purposes, including its own political ends. Alternatively, those responsible for its administration will bungle its use in such a way that it will have the effect of blighting people"s lives in the same way as the Department of Immigration has done to many of the asylum seekers under its charge.   Contrary to the misnomer "the war on terror", this is not a war and the threat to Australia is much less than it was in the Second World War or even the Cold War. Nevertheless, the history of the surrender of liberties in times of war is not an attractive one. In Australia during the Second World War, extensive powers were granted to the attorney-general to detain and intern people suspected of affinities with the enemy. Most of the exercise of such powers later proved to be unnecessary.   There has been a failure of leadership on all sides of politics in relation to these changes and this has been coupled with a failure by ordinary members of Parliament generally to discharge their responsibilities to the Australian people.   The Government under the leadership of this Prime Minister has embodied a true neo-conservative approach to Government modelled on the worst possible examples of this approach in the US. But the Opposition is not without blame in this saga and bears much of the responsibility for the introduction of the destructive immigration policy that this country has pursued since the early 1990s. Nevertheless, this Government has pursued it with messianic vigour to the point where many thinking Australians, myself included, have felt ashamed of their country.   The Howard Government"s fear agenda has been allowed to flourish as the Labor Party has sat back like the little kid at school who gets sand kicked in his face and who is too frightened to upset the big boys.   The Labor Party I know would have fought tooth and nail against Australia"s involvement in Iraq without UN sanctions. They would have protected Australia from terrorism by simply not being party to an illegal war. Their voices would have been loud and would have clearly defined what they stood for. The Labor Party I know would have countered Howard"s fear agenda with one of peace.   This climate of fear is Howard"s creation and instead of counteracting it with an alternative, forceful, intelligent debate, the Labor Party blindly accepts it and helps promote it.   The reality is that we have witnessed a complete and abject failure by Australia"s politicians to provide much-needed leadership to this country and they have sacrificed our freedoms in the process.   Driven by fear and the need to act, we run the risk of a series of overreactions in our response to terrorism. This is the very dynamic that terrorists rely upon. What they cannot achieve by military might, they seek to achieve by stimulating our fears. Indeed, it is by our own actions that we are likely to isolate and ostracise members of our community who might then become targets for terrorist recruitment. It is also by our own actions that we travel further from our ideal of what a democratic and open society based upon the rule of law should be.   (Alastair Nicholson, QC, is an honorary professorial fellow in the criminology department at Melbourne University and former chief justice of the Family Court of Australia).
	This is not only a French Crisis - All of Europe must heed the warning by The Daily Star / The Guardian European Union   November 2005   France is not alone in living above a Volcano, by Michel Rocard. (The Daily Star / Project Syndicate)   As I write this, the French are still reeling from violent clashes with the police that have been going on for weeks in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities. At its peak, cars were being set afire at a rate of nearly 1,000 per night. Why is this happening? How far can it go?   The existence of thousands of unemployed young people, without income or roots, idle and knowing only violence to express their quest for recognition, is not particularly French. Everyone remembers the Watts, Newark and Detroit riots in the United States in the 1960s, and the riots in Liverpool in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, as well as in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley in more recent years. Likewise, France had riots in Vaux-en-Velin, near Lyon, 20 years ago. So it is important to distinguish what is common to many developed countries and what is specific to France.   All the developed economies have undergone profound changes during the last 30 years. We have gone from managerial to stockowner capitalism, from economies with large doses of state direction to far more deregulated markets, from the active and expansive social policies of the 1960s and 1970s to a world in which such spending is constantly shrinking.   Although wealth has been growing constantly - GDP has more than doubled in the last 50 years - the share of wages in the total has diminished by 10 percent, even while millions of the rich have become much richer. Everywhere, this has meant massive pauperization of the least favored parts of the population. In rich countries, mass poverty, which seemed to have been eliminated around 1980, has reappeared. Access to good education, and even more so to the labor market, is increasingly restricted for many young people, especially those who come from poor or single-parent families or from minority ethnic backgrounds, languages or religions.   These people feel rejected and unrecognized. "Because they want to break us, we will break everything" is the motto that best expresses their mood. There are untold reservoirs of social violence in all of our lands.   But against this shared background, France exhibits some important distinctive features. First, demography: for the last 50 years France has had much higher fertility rates than the rest of Europe - 1.9 children per woman, compared to the European average of 1.6 and the German or Spanish rates of 1.3. In Germany, every generation entering the labor market is smaller than the one exiting it. In France, by contrast, 200,000 to 300,000 more people enter the labor market than leave it in each generation - and this does not include immigration, which, although slowing recently, represents a large number of job seekers. As rates of economic growth have declined, this has meant growing unemployment.   Then there is geography: France"s massive urban concentration around the capital - Paris and its suburbs contain nearly 20 percent of the population - is unique in Europe. The sheer number of confused and disoriented young people has overwhelmed the French system"s capacity to integrate them - even though its capacity in this regard is, in fact, impressive.   Indeed, France has opened its public educational system to an extraordinary degree, refusing all group rights to minorities, but vigorously affirming personal rights, including full access to all social services, regardless of language, religion or skin color. The system is cracking, but only because of the limits of its absorptive capacity, not because of its core principles.   In these circumstances, every French politician has known for the last 20 years that France has been living with a growing risk that isolated incidents might coalesce into a critical mass of violence. The task of social workers and police, therefore, is to try to resolve - quickly and discreetly - each particular incident, in order to dampen the revolt.   What needs to be done also has been well known since 20 years ago, when a nonpartisan report by a cross-party group of big-city mayors unanimously agreed on measures to be taken: efficient repression, highly developed social prevention, a permanent local police presence, and a renewed effort at reintegrating delinquents.   The difficulty with implementing this policy has been that its preventive aspects - social support and reintegration of delinquents - appear to the frightened population living in the affected areas as being "soft on crime" and overly generous. But for the past three years, France has had a government that no longer believes that a socially oriented urban policy works. It believes only in repression and says so openly. As a result, local police forces have been reduced from 20,000 to 11,000, while the national riot police has been reinforced.   France is now experiencing a practical demonstration of this insane and totally inefficient policy, with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy providing a telling illustration of the new orientation when he described the rebellious young as "scum." It was the proverbial match thrown by a careless smoker into a parched forest. The young responded with a vengeance to Sarkozy"s provocation.   The main risk now is that events in the suburbs of large French cities will serve as an example to other young people, whether in the less urban areas of France or in other European countries, who feel socially excluded and are, perhaps, just as prone to violent outbursts. Solving the problems underlying the French revolt will require time, discretion, mutual respect, community-based social and police work - rather than a centralized, repressive approach - and a lot of money. But France is by no means the only country that should be worried.   (Michel Rocard, a former prime minister of France and leader of the Socialist Party, is a member of the European Parliament).   10th Nov. 2005   "This is not only a French Crisis - All of Europe must heed the Flames", by Timothy Garton Ash. (The Guardian)   Europeans of immigrant descent are speaking to us through a pillar of fire. They need acceptance as hyphenated Europeans   In the Bible, we read that God guided his people out of Egypt with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Now the impoverished youth of France"s outer-city ghettoes are speaking to all of us through a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. Their pillars are made of burning cars - some 6,000 to date - yet this apparently pointless violence has as clear a message as the one Moses followed. Europe, which to their immigrant parents seemed like the promised land, has turned into a new bondage.   "You know," a young man called Bilal told a reporter at Housing Project 112 in Aubervilliers, "when you brandish a Molotov cocktail, you are saying "help!" One doesn"t have the words to say what one resents; one only knows how to talk by setting fire." So they know what they are doing. They speak through fire.   To say this is not to justify the resort to violence. Nothing in the world can justify the beating to death of an elderly, innocent bystander, Jean-Jacques le Chenadec, a retired car worker who was reportedly just trying to extinguish a fire in a rubbish bin near his home. Nothing. But even as a fragile social peace is, we hope, restored through the drastic means of declaring a state of emergency, we have to start understanding what is being said through the flames.   Some commentators have contrasted peaceful, multicultural Britain with explosive, monocultural France. That seems to me dangerous complacency. Of course, the message of the burning Renaults and Citroëns is directed first and foremost at France"s leaders. No country in Europe has a larger proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, mainly from the African continent and mainly Muslim: an estimated six to seven million of them, or more than 10% of the population.   In few other European countries are those of immigrant descent so heavily ghettoised as they are in impoverished housing estates like No 112 at Aubervilliers. In few other countries could an interior minister denounce the rioters as "rabble" who deserve to be sand-blasted, and yet remain one of the most popular politicians in the land. Indeed, few European countries have a more exclusive metropolitan elite.   Just a few descendants of France"s postwar trans-Mediterranean immigrants appear in public life. Their position was perfectly summed up for me by a recent picture in Le Monde which showed the silver-haired prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, greeting Mr Azouz Begag, the minister for the promotion of equality of opportunity, by patting him on the head. Pat, pat, nice little Azouz. Meanwhile, the social reality of "equal opportunity" is best summarised in the title of a book by a Moroccan-born businessman, The Social Elevator is Broken; I Took the Stairs. The evidence of endemic racism in the French labour market is overwhelming. The British writer Jonathan Fenby tells the story of an entertainer in one of those housing estates who wrote two job application letters to a state television channel. One gave his African name and his real address; the other, a French name and a better address. The first received a refusal, the second an invitation for an interview.   Moreover, France represents the European extreme of attempted assimilation. No other European state has been so aggressively rigorous in its banning of the Islamic headscarf. None has made fewer concessions to cultural difference. As Alain Duhamel observes in his book French Disarray, "the only community France recognises is the national community".   All this is peculiar to, or at least most extremely represented by, the French Republic. But have no illusions: this is a problem that afflicts the whole of Europe. It was second-generation immigrants in peaceful, multicultural Britain who perpetrated the far-worse atrocity of the July bombings in London. Indeed, in the form of their revolt, Bilal and his comrades are in a way speaking old-fashioned French, albeit French without words. For spectacular but not ultimately very bloody protests, with road blocks and barricades, are part of a more than 200-year-old French revolutionary tradition. France"s second-generation immigrant youths burned cars; ours burned human beings. Which would you prefer? And it was peaceful, multicultural Holland which last year saw the ritual murder of Theo van Gogh.   Most west European societies have large, dissatisfied communities of immigrant descent. We brought them here in the first place, partly as the legacy of our retreating European empires, partly as workers to perform the menial jobs native Europeans did not want to do, in the years of impressive economic growth after 1945. We kept them, for the most part, at arm"s length, treating them as denizens rather than full citizens of Europe. In Germany, for example, most of the so-called Gastarbeiter from Turkey were, until recently, not invited to take up German citizenship, even if they had lived there for 30 years. And the post-9/11 "war on terror" has added new grounds for alienation.   This is an all-European problem. I"m tempted to say it"s the all-European problem; or at least, first-equal with that of creating more jobs. The two are closely related. In many of the housing estates now speaking through fire, unemployment is as much as 40%, while the average age is under 30. Meanwhile, the older, native-European unemployed are strongly represented among the electorate of Jean-Marie le Pen"s National Front, and other anti-immigrant parties across Europe. This has all the makings of a downward spiral.   On all reasonable assumptions, Europe"s population of immigrant descent and Muslim culture will grow significantly over the next decade, both through higher relative birth rates and further immigration. If we cannot make even those who have lived in Europe since birth feel at home here, there will be all hell to pay. Six thousand burning cars will seem like nothing more than an hors-d"oeuvre.   Addressing their socio-economic problems is half the answer, but very difficult, since the key is jobs and jobs are being created in Asia and America more than in Europe. The other half has to do with citizenship, identity and the everyday attitudes of each and every one of their fellow citizens.   Being European should be the overarching civic identity which allows immigrants and those of immigrant descent to feel at home. Indeed, it should, in theory, be easier to feel Turkish-European, Algerian-European or Moroccan-European than it is to feel Turkish-German, Algerian-French or Moroccan-Spanish, because being European is by definition a broader, more all-embracing identity. But it isn"t easier.   Somehow, Europeanness doesn"t work like that. Native-born Europeans can feel French-European, German-European or Spanish-European. Some - we happy few, we band of brothers - even feel British-European. And there are examples of people who definitely do feel, say, Pakistani-British or Tunisian-French. But the direct hyphenation rarely works. To address the greatest problem of our continent, and not just of France, we need to do nothing less than to redefine what it means to be a European.
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