1 February 2001 Edition

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Shackled Moldovans shame Department of Justice

Nineteen Moldovans came to Dublin on valid work permits to take up jobs in the meat industry last week. When they arrived they were told the jobs had gone and to add to this céad míle fáilte, they were then taken by Gardai and Dublin Airport immigration offices to Mountjoy Jail. They appeared shackled in court four days later, having gone on hunger strike in protest at the abuse of their rights. Their lawyers successfully challenged the wrongful actions of the Gardai and Department of Justice.

Compounding the felony, the director general of the Irish Prisons Service, Sean Aylward, defended the chaining of the litigants. He condemned not the chaining itself but those who had published the photographs of the men chained.

Mr. Justice O'Sullivan ordered the immediate release of the men on Thursday, 25 January, and stated that their detention had been unlawful.

As Donncha O'Connell, director of the Irish Council of Civil Liberties, pointed out at last weekend's conference on ``Ireland: Pluralism or Prejudice'', there was a marked absence of comment from those responsible at the Department of Justice. This went for Minister John O'Donoghue and junior minister Liz O'Donnell, who hit the headlines last year with her condemnation of O'Donoghue's policy towards refugees, which she described as a `shambles'.

The denial of the right to work to asylum seekers, has undoubtedly contributed to growing racism in Irish Society. Gabriel Okenla, director of the Pan African Organisation, which jointly organised last Saturday's conference with the irish Council for Civil Liberties, opened the conference with the chilling announcement that ``Ireland is a racist country. I have come here to tell you the truth.''

Okenla went on to instance many examples of racism that he and so many others have experienced in seeking work, in dealings with the police and immigration authorities, in gaining access to medical facilities and accommodation. ``The fact that we are black makes us the subject of ridicule, abuse, and the object of racist-inspired violence and attack. That is the reality here in Ireland.''

As one speaker at the conference pointed out, unlike in the US or England, there is no crime in law that applies to racially aggravated attack. ``All we have in Ireland is the Incitement to Hatred Act, which is so weak in its provisions that it can only be described as pathetic.''

Donncha O'Connell, in an outstanding contribution, spoke of the scope afforded to human rights activists in the use of international conventions to force the Dublin government to comply with its human rights obligations.

Emerging from the Good Friday Agreement there is the Human Rights Commission, which the government has been forced, most reluctantly, to set up. There is the Equality Authority, with the potential to equality proof present and future legislation. There is also the Equal Status Act, now law, which offers wide potential to seek redress against discrimination.

The Dublin Government is under increasing international pressure to incorporate the Human Rights Convention into our law. It remains the only one of 41 states in the Council of Europe not yet to have done so.

Increasingly, the government is under pressure to satisfy the international demand for compliance with international standards of respect for human rights.

It may not eradicate the existing racism in this country, which has been so carefully fostered by government in their treatment of asylum seekers and immigrant workers, but it represents a small beginning in the long war to end discrimination and to govern with a respect for the rights of human beings, whatever their colour or origin.

Nineteen entirely innocent human beings in chains was a very bad beginning.


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