Not just the UK then...

[Gob]

A DETAINED Indonesian refugee who beat his Australian spouse to death with a child’s ­bicycle should be released into the community and given $350,000 compensation for seven years of “arbitrary” detention, the Australian Human Rights Commission has found.

John Basikbasik, 51, a former West Papuan independence ­activist, has been repeatedly deemed too dangerous for release following decades of violent offending fuelled by alcohol. His offences include the manslaughter of his de facto wife in 2000 and numerous assaults during his seven-year jail term from 2001. He has been held in detention since 2007.

Mental health experts have ­assessed him as having a high or moderate risk of reoffending, citing his impulsive personality and lack of “insight” into his crimes. Basikbasik had failed to adapt to a Western lifestyle, one said.

HRC president Gillian Triggs accused successive federal governments, dating back to the Howard era, of breaching the man’s human rights by holding him in immigration detention rather than monitoring him in the community.

“There is no information ­before me to indicate that the commonwealth considered whether any risk which Mr ­Basikbasik posed to the community could be mitigated by a management plan to assist with his rehabilitation or by a requirement to reside at a specified ­location, with curfews, travel restrictions or regular ­reporting,” Dr Triggs wrote.

“I find that the failure of the Minister (of Immigration) to place Mr Basikbasik into community detention or another less restrictive form of detention — if necessary, with conditions — was inconsistent with the prohibition on arbitrary detention in … the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

The Abbott government has rejected Dr Triggs’s recommendations, arguing that Basikbasik’s ongoing detention was “appropriate, reasonable and justified in the individual circumstances of his case and therefore not arbitrary”.

“His criminal history and imprisonment as a result of his criminal conviction of manslaughter in September 2001 would have been relevant in considering risk to the Australian community,” former immigration minister Scott Morrison wrote to Dr Triggs last May.

Dr Triggs’s push to have Basikbasik released into the community is detailed in a commission report released late last year.

The Australian has uncovered details of his offences and the psychologists’ reports.

The Abbott government has rejected a string of controversial arbitrary detention findings by Dr Triggs in recent months. The Australian last week reported Dr Triggs had recommended a $300,000 payout for a US-born convicted fraudster whom the government deported after he swindled $644,000 from taxpayers and banks.

The man was held in ­detention while delaying deportation with legal arguments ­described by the Federal Court as “frivolous, vexatious, embarrassing and (lacking) any support”.

Basikbasik, a self-described former alcoholic who fathered 14 children to four different women in Australia, cannot be returned to Indonesia because successive government assessments have concluded he is a genuine refugee.

Basikbasik pleaded guilty to the 2000 manslaughter of his spouse after first being charged with murder. Police said he had struck her over the head with a child’s bicycle several times after first punching her in the head.

Chief Justice Paul De Jersey sentenced him to seven years’ jail for “spontaneous” attack and noted he was “drunk at the time”.

Psychiatrist Kipling Walker found Basikbasik displayed a “persistent pattern of abnormal emotions and behaviour” and was at high risk of violent reoffending.

“He continues to use threats to get what he wants,” he wrote. “He has little insight into his problems with his temper. He will not benefit from psychiatric or psychological treatment,” Dr Walker reported in 2010.

Another psychologist, Emma Collins, found Basikbasik’s risk profile might be downgraded to “moderate” with “a proper management plan … and a supportive environment”. She warned he did “not appear to have acculturated to Westernised lifestyle” and likely expressed himself through ­aggression “due to his culture and the influence of machismo”.

Basikbasik has committed many violent crimes since arriving from Papua New Guinea in a canoe in 1985 and has a history of breaching bail conditions. In 1986 he was sentenced to community service for disorderly behaviour and in 1989 he was sentenced to three months’ jail for grievous bodily harm. Over the next seven years he was convicted and fined for numerous assaults, property damage and failure to answer bail. These include a string of offences in 1999 that included causing wilful damage, obstructing police and drug possession.

The Immigration Department said Basikbasik was involved in 50 behaviour-related incidents in detention, including assault.

[MajGenl.Meade]

What a twat!