Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, Population

AUSTRALIA: Gov’t under Pressure to Free Children of Asylum Seekers

Bob Burton

CANBERRA, May 16 2004 (IPS) - Pressure is growing on the Australian government to release 150 children being held in immigration prisons, in the wake of a major investigation into the effects of the practice.

”The harsh reality is that children who fled cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment under Saddam Hussein and the Taliban have been found to be subject to ‘cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment’ in Australia on the watch of Prime Minister John Howard,” said Howard Glenn, national director of the human rights organisation A Just Australia.

”The cruel and inhumane treatment of the 150 children still in detention – 70 of whom are on Nauru – must be brought to an end,” Glenn said. ”They must be released,” he said.

Nauru, a tiny Pacific nation of 11,000 is home to a detention centre created in 2001 after Canberra agreed to give it funds to take in asylum seekers headed for Australia’s shores but whom it did not want to take. The asylum seekers include Iraqis and Afghans.

Glenn was speaking after a scathing 900-page report by the Australian government’s own Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HEREOC) found that the way the Australian government implemented its immigration laws had ”resulted in numerous and repeated breaches” of the human rights of asylum seekers.

The report was compiled after a two-year long investigation into the Australian government’s practice of holding children in detention while their families’ applications for refugee status are processed.

”Children in immigration detention for long periods of time are at high risk of serious mental harm,” said the report issued Friday.

”The Commonwealth’s failure to implement the repeated recommendations by mental health professionals that certain children be removed from the detention environment with their parents amounted to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of those children in detention,” it added.

The report is a potential source of major international embarrassment for the Australian government, which was recently elected to chair the Human Rights Commission at the United Nations.

This is even more so since the majority of the children held in immigration detention have usually been granted refugee status anyway. ”More than 92 percent of all children arriving by boat since 1999 have been recognised by Australian authorities to be refugees,” the report said. ”In the case of Iraqi children the figures are as high as 98 percent.”

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Australia is a signatory, provides that ”the arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be à used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time”.

At the Friday launch of the report – entitled A Last Resort? – human rights commissioner Dr Sev Ozdowski recounted that on one visit to a detention centre, a woman whose child suffered from cerebral palsy only had the option of moving her child around in a metal shopping cart.

”The longest a child has been in detention in Australia is five years, five months and 20 days. That means the whole of years of high school! And he was found to be a genuine refugee at the end of that time,” Ozdowski said.

Likewise, the report said: ”The treatment of some of these children has left them severely traumatised and with long-term mental health problems. Children with emotional and physical scars will be a legacy of our mandatory detention policy.”

A Just Australia argues that former immigration minister and now attorney-general Phillip Ruddock must be held accountable for these rights violations and immigration detention policy. ”The report exposes a regime of institutionalised child abuse presided over by Mr Ruddock whilst he was immigration minister. He must resign,” Glenn said.

The report, which notes that improvements in conditions were made after the inquiry commenced, recommends that the government release all remaining children held in detention within the next month.

It also recommends that federal Parliament amend legislation to ”ensure that detention is no longer the first and only resort for asylum-seeker children”.

The HEREOC report barely conceals its disdain for the Australian government’s racially biased policy of imprisoning those that arrive by boat.

”The sad reality is that if you came by boat, you are put in detention. But if you came by air from England or Ireland or France and overstay your visa, no one bothers chasing you. In fact, there are 60,000 such ‘illegals’ in this country. The government doesn’t seem to worry about them at all,” the commission wrote.

Before the report could be publicly released, it had to be officially tabled in parliament.

In an attempt to bury the damaging report, the government tabled it in Parliament late Thursday last week, amid the media’s preoccupation with legislation and debate over the government’s election year budget unveiled earlier in the week.

”The timing of the report is just one more example of the shabby attempts at media manipulation by the government over this issue. Try as they might, they can’t evade the extraordinary details in this report,” Glenn said in an interview.

The president of the Refugee Council of Australia, David Bitel, pointed to the contradiction of the government proclaiming that its budget was ‘family friendly’ because of additional spending on child care – and its imprisonment of asylum-seeker children.

”If the government were serious about being family friendly, how can they justify their robust defence of a policy that has caused so much suffering?” he said.

But Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone dismissed the HEREOC report: ”The government rejects the major findings and recommendations contained in this report.”

The release of children, she claimed, would only encourage people smuggling. ”What it says to people smugglers is that if you bring children, you’ll be able to be out in the community very quickly,” she said.

The opposition Labour Party, which introduced the policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers who arrive by boat, has backed calls for the release of the children.

But wary of alienating conservative blue-collar supporters who once voted for the xenophobic One Nation Party, the Labor Party remains committed to imprisoning adult asylum seekers that arrive by boat.