|
Excellent post. From working many years with many refugees from many countries, most of which have national ID cards, I am able to inform our gentle readers that the first casualty of ID cards is your freedom to walk down the street unmolested by police. It can be used as a pretext to stop anyone, anywhere, anytime. It can be coupled with any other criterion of discrimination the police feel like acting on. In our case, it is most likely to be men or women wearing Islamic dress. (Popular opinion, or prejudice, might say that's not a bad thing, but that's only because that's the way the wind blows at this time. We think it's wrong for the Arabs of Iraq to persecute Kurds, and the Han of China to persecute Uygurs, and the Singhalese of Sri Lanka to persecute Tamils, for similar reasons. Yet we would be laying ourselves open to similar errors.) Anyone not carrying the card is for that reason immediately liable to detention in police custody, until he can be brought before a magistrate. This has to be the next sitting day, so if you are taken in on Friday evening, you could be inside for three nights and two days. I have even had Aboriginal clients whom the police, in order to induce them to make a statement, have threatened to come around to their place on Friday evening and arrest them. The resulting imprisonment, while unjust, will be 'below the radar' of our criminal justice system, which will neither prevent nor remedy it. Of all the different types of human rights abuses in all the countries of the world, torture or other cruel mistreatment during such short-term detention is by far the commonest item. While still persecutory, it is at the low end of the spectrum, it is hidden, it complements police powers, it is short-term, its injuries are usually temporary, and it is often within the framework of practice while still being illegal. It is abusive and dangerous. It may be said that such detention in Australia carries no such risks. However it was only a few years ago that news came out of the 'Darlinghurst drop', a method of the Kings Cross police of holding a prisoner between two policemen, swinging him by his arms and legs, and finally throwing him up in an arc, trajectory or lob, onto the concrete floor. In fact, police in Australia have a long history of physical mistreatments of prisoners in custody, and the risk is probably higher where the prisoners are members of an unpopular political minority. Quite apart from that, as Sandman is noted, ID cards would do nothing to stop people from loading up a backpack with explosives, boarding a train and doing their bit for their notion of a better world. They are just another example of a failure of government being used as a pretext for calls for more government.
| 
