By Mark Davis | CIVIL rights advocates have seized on Federal Government plans for legal bans on torture to argue for tighter controls on the use of tasers by police.
The Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, said yesterday the Government was taking steps to ratify the optional protocol to the United Nations convention against torture, which would allow international inspectors to visit Australian prisons.
He said the Government was also considering making torture an offence under federal law, which would bolster state prohibitions and might also apply to Australians overseas.
The president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, Terry O’Gorman, called on the Government to push for stricter state rules on the use of tasers by police.
Tasers – electronic stun guns used to paralyse offenders – are used by police in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia.
Mr O’Gorman said they were extremely painful, potentially lethal and overused by police.
But Mr McClelland said the UN anti-torture rules and the use of tasers were separate issues.
“Clearly, if a taser is used as an alternative to shooting someone dead, then that is one thing,” he said. “If, on the other hand, a taser was used to repeatedly fire into someone for the purpose of eliciting information, then obviously that is a different situation.”
Australia has already ratified the UN convention against torture, which requires signatories to stop torture inside their borders.
But the Howard government refused to ratify the convention’s optional protocol, which allows for inspections of signatories’ prisons, detention centres and psychiatric institutions.
While neither the convention nor the protocol prohibits tasers, the UN’s committee against torture has said they can cause acute pain amounting to torture.
A spokesman for the NSW Police Minister, David Campbell, said the UN convention would not affect the use of tasers by NSW police because they were tightly monitored and were not used in questioning of offenders or suspects.
“The taser has been issued to specially trained NSW police officers and is used to subdue an offender who presents an immediate threat to the public and/or police,” the spokesman said.