Needed: European action on Indigenous Australians' rights

One of these is the UN Human Rights Commission (HRC), which noted last year that the Australian government’s mandatory sentencing of juveniles raised "a serious issue of compliance" with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. At the HRC’s March/April 2001 meeting in Geneva, the Commission established a Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights of Indigenous People.

The rapporteur will have a three-year term and will be able to visit countries to which he is invited. In the present climate it may seem unlikely that the Australian government will extend him an invitation. But with information from governments, Indigenous people themselves and their organizations, he will provide another international focal point for publicising the violations of Indigenous Australians’ human rights.

Not all awareness-raising takes place in the high councils of Parliament, academia or the United Nations. Earlier this year, British actor-director Kenneth Branagh waived his usual fee to play a white official who tried to destroy the Aboriginal race in Australia. Branagh plays AO Neville, a functionary with the title Protector of the Aborigines, in Philip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence. It is based on the true story of a government initiative to force Aborigines to assimilate with white families, and thus breed them out of existence, during the 1920s and 1930s.

The film follows three Aboriginal girls who are forcibly taken from their mother's home in 1931. They escape and try to find their way home along a rabbit-proof fence. The film's producer, Christine Olsen, says: "The white people in the film are our grandparents. There are no moral judgements – it's a human story. We’re all products of our time, so we shouldn't try to be morally superior."