Transcript
ELAINE PEARSON: Unfortunately there has not been no real progress on human rights in 2018. We are seeing the pervasive problems of corruption, land confiscation without adequate compensation, gender based violence, police abuse, prison over-crowding - all of these are key challenges, and also in 2018, we saw that there is really an ongoing health crisis, with the polio outbreak. At the same time I think PNG really wanted to put on its best face for the APEC summit. Unfortunately the issues around the APEC summit really drew attention to PNG for all the wrong reasons because of these allegations of corruption and waste while the country is really struggling to provide basic social services for its people.
DON WISEMAN: Is there a sense that in some areas PNG is going backwards?
EP: I don't know if it is going backwards, it's that there are no positive steps forward. So I think on women's rights for instance, despite the legal steps that were taken some years ago we are seeing that there continues to be sorcery related killings, family violence continues unabated - there's very few prosecutions on these cases. With regards to police abuse, again, a real failure to hold abusive security forces to account. So we see this repeated pattern in PNG where specific cases might be captured on video and draw widespread condemnation nationally and internationally, yet in very few cases are police officers prosecuted and convicted.
DW: We must say here that just in the past week or so there have been revelations of a number of jailings and arrests in the Port Moresby area - in a number of cases involving violence offences. So police, certainly in Port Moresby, are starting to act on some of the things that they have been talking about for some time.
EP: Well I think it is encouraging to hear if there has been some movement in Port Moresby to actually prosecuting individual police officers, but obviously there is still a long way to go and I think too often we have seen this pattern where police officers may be initially suspended or discharged from their duties, yet it is very difficult to know if they have been prosecuted for offences they have committed against people who are criminal suspects or people in their care. And I think that's where there needs to be a bit more action by PNG police to hold abusive officers to account and not simply to suspend them from active duty or discharge them..
DW: Now sorcery related violence is continuing. There have been changes to the law but there doesn't seem to be much actually happening.
EP: In PNG it is positive that there have been some legal changes but we are seeing these killings continue and unfortunately sorcery related violence is something that has brought quite a lot of international condemnation of PNG. I think people are quite shocked that this is going on and yet we continue in a number of cases, both men and women being accused of sorcery and then subjected to quite serious violence, beatings and so on. And in the worse cases obviously people who are killed.
DW: The controversial Special Agricultural Business Leases. The government has said they are going to get rid of them but through the course of the past year, to the best of our knowledge, none of them have been removed. What does your organisation make of that?
EP: I think on the land confiscation issue there has been a lot of attention brought on the PNG government to address these issues, but we haven't really seen the government acting to provide compensation to individuals who have had their land confiscated. So we have seen that a lot of land has been awarded to PNG based subsidiaries of foreign companies as a result of these SABLs. The result means that a lot of this land has been taken away from rural Papua New Guineans. So we really need a lot more attention on the impact of this and how this is affecting people's everyday lives.
DW: In terms of maternal health there are some details that you raise in the report that indicate care being provided for women is worse than it's been in recent years.
EP: Well I think for some years now PNG has had one of the highest rates of maternal death, certainly in the Asia/Pacific, and that's really because there hasn't been the right kinds of money put into health services, particularly for rural women, so that the number of women who are actually giving birth inside hospitals is actually very low. And so while the PNG government has made these broad commitments to providing better maternal care, to providing better support for women, you know there are still concerns around access to contraception. And so because of this we continue to see PNG having really one of the highest rates of maternal deaths in the region. Also abortion remains illegal and there have been individual cases where women, and sometimes men, have been prosecuted for conducting abortions. So access to contraception is also something that there needs to be more effort on the part of the government. It's not sufficient for the UN or civil society organisations to be running campaigns on these issues, we really need to see government political will to address these issues and provide better basic health services for women in PNG.
