MANDATORY JAIL: PUSH TO WIDEN NET

The Northern Territory's ruling Country Liberal Party has called on
the Territory Government to extend controversial mandatory sentencing
to include drug traffickers.

The party's annual conference at the weekend supported mandatory
minimum prison terms for drug trafficking as well as for property offences.

The director of the Northern Territory Aboriginal Legal Aid Service,
Mr Gordon Renouf, said the proposal appeared to be "political
window-dressing", given the Territory already had laws requiring
mandatory prison terms for serious offences such as drug
trafficking.

Mr Renouf said serious drug trafficking convictions already attract
prison sentences.

The CLP president, Ms Suzanne Cavanagh, said, "The CLP is absolutely
and totally in support of mandatory sentencing. We passed a motion
calling for the Government to introduce mandatory minimum custodial
sentences for people found guilty of trafficking drugs because, as far
as we're concerned, the magistrates are not delivering.

"We know that [Chief Minister] Denis Burke doesn't necessarily support
that to the degree that we do."

The motion did not differentiate between adult and juvenile
offenders.

The Federal Government has been attacked by United Nations human
rights committees and its own backbench over mandatory sentencing in
the Territory, particularly of children. The regime has been branded
racist and in breach of Australia's international obligations to children.

The conference passed a motion yesterday praising the Federal
Government's stance against UN criticism, most recently by the UN
Human Rights Committee that condemned mandatory sentencing last month
in the context of its effect on Aborigines.

In the motion the CLP expressed deep concern at the UN's direct
involvement in the Territory's internal affairs.

The CLP also strongly supported the Federal Government's approach in
standing by the rights of Australians on an issues basis before the
UN.

The president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Mr Kevin
O'Rourke, said the new mandatory sentencing call would be a further
breach of UN obligations.

"The significance of it is that the Howard Government has failed to
act regarding mandatory sentencing and this has given licence to
people within the broad umbrella of the Coalition to move towards
mandatory sentencing as a panacea for all sorts of social ills," he
said.

"Mandatory sentencing tends to get bandied around as States' rights,
but everyone else has rights and at the end of the day the Federal
Government has the power to legislate away mandatory
sentencing."

He said recent studies showed that sentences "were in fact getting
longer" because judges were responding to "simple, populist, tougher
sentencing" calls from the community.

A spokeswoman for the NSW Attorney-General, Mr Debus, said NSW had
life sentences for large-scale drug-trafficking, and juveniles could
be tried in adult courts on drug offences that carried jail terms of
five years or more.

"We already have mandatory life sentences for the most serious drug
traffickers," the spokeswoman said.

The Australian Law Reform Commission and the Human Rights and Equal
Opportunities Commission recommended in a 1997 study that the Federal
Attorney-General should encourage Western Australia and the Northern
Territory to repeal their mandatory sentencing laws. If that failed,
the report recommended that the Federal Government consider
legislation to override Western Australia and the Northern Territory.