Recommendations The National Inquiry made 54 recommendations. Many were based on international principles for reparation in respect of gross violations of human rights, which provided for reparation in five areas: acknowledgement and apology; restitution; compensation where restitution is not possible; rehabilitation; and guarantees against repetition.23 Others were based on international human rights law in relation to children, particularly the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Among other recommendations, the Inquiry urged Australian parliaments and governments and other governmental institutions and authorities involved in implementing removals to apologise and acknowledge responsibility for harm caused to Indigenous Australians affected by the past laws, policies and practices. It proposed the establishment of a national compensation scheme, whereby individual victims could make claims on grounds such as racial discrimination, deprivation of liberty, pain and suffering, economic loss and other abuses of human rights. It also made recommendations relating to contemporary removals, to address the continuing large numbers of Indigenous children and young people removed for juvenile justice or welfare reasons. Follow-up There have been numerous responses to the National Inquiry by governments and other authorities, with politically controversial outcomes. When the report was tabled, the then federal Coalition Government refused to apologise for the human rights violations inflicted on the Stolen Generations. Nevertheless, the Government directed resources to several major initiatives. In particular, it was willing to support programmes to assist Indigenous family reunification through locating separated family members, opening access to government records and providing counselling. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was funded to undertake national coordination of Link-Ups, an existing network of state-based services that facilitated family reunifications for those affected by forcible removal. It established the Bringing Them Home Taskforce in 1998 to monitor the National Link-Up Network’s implementation. Further funding established an oral history project to document victims’ stories of removal and its effects, as well as an archiving project to assist access to and preservation of Indigenous files on record with the state, partly for the purpose of tracing family members. In 2000, a Senate Committee recommended, among other things, a National Apology and the establishment of a reparations tribunal to deal with compensation claims, including monetary compensation. The second recommendation remains to be acted upon; Tasmania alone has established a compensation scheme for one-off payments to Tasmanian Aboriginal members of the Stolen Generations. However, the Senate’s reinforcement of the Inquiry’s original recommendations demonstrated the enduring potential of a national inquiry to hold government accountable for the contemporary consequences of past institutional failures and abuses of power. Bringing them home highlighted the significance of an apology as the foundation for healing. In the years immediately after the Inquiry’s report was released, all Australian state and territory parliaments and governments made formal apologies to the members of the Stolen Generations and their families.24 The then federal Coalition Government refused, however. This generated an enormous public response, with campaigns for the apology in every State and Territory. During 2000, hundreds of thousands of Australians in cities and towns marched across bridges to show their commitment to the apology recommended by the National Inquiry. On 28 May 2000, more than a quarter of a million people crossed 23 The inquiry’s approach to reparations was based on the Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law 24 May 1996 (E/CN4/Sub2/1996/17). These have now been replaced by and reflected in Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law adopted by the UN General Assembly on16 December 2005 (A/RES/60/147). Acknowledgement and satisfaction are dealt with as “satisfaction”. 24 See: www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/bringing-them-home-apologies-state-and-territory-parliaments-2008. Case studies | 91