Release all the children!

Dianne Hiles, Sydney

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) undertook an inquiry during 2002 into children in immigration detention.

On May 13, the report, "A Last Resort?", and its recommendations were tabled, very quietly, in federal parliament. The report found that the detention process breaches our obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Australia signed in 1990.

This includes a child's right to be detained only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time; to be protected from physical and mental violence; to not be subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; and to enjoy the highest attainable standard of health care and an appropriate education on the basis of equal opportunity.

Immigration minister Amanda Vanstone dismissed the report as disappointing, unbalanced and "backwards looking".

Conditions have improved for detainees over the last three years. They are no longer called by numbers or subjected to head counts during the night. Some children are allowed to attend external schools. But the system that permitted such systemic child abuse is still in place.

"A Last Resort?" calls for the release of all children, with their families, from immigration detention centres within four weeks of the tabling of the report. In an ideal world, therefore, all children should be released by June 10. But they won't be.

This government is in double denial. They deny children their basic inalienable human rights, and then they deny that there have been any breaches of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The report's publication has hardly affronted the nation's sensibilities. Was it even reported in many papers around the country? If we allow this report and its recommendations to be ignored, where can we go next? Nowhere.

We have to make June 10 matter. In Sydney, ChilOut, Amnesty International and other groups are gathering at Sydney Square (next to the Town Hall and St Andrews Cathedral) from 4pm. We need as many children as possible to attend for a special ceremony and bell ringing at 5pm.

The inhumane policy of mandatory detention of children and their families has to change.

For more information visit or outside Sydney visit .

From Green Left Weekly, June 9, 2004.

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From GLW issue 585