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Child casualties in the war against people smugglers
ABC Newcastle - October 29, 2011
Of the 500 people arrested, a disturbing number are children. They are boys from Indonesian fishing villages who are recruited to work as cooks and deckhands on asylum seeker boats.
It is official policy not to charge children caught in this situation – they are supposed to be deported. But it is thought there may be as many as 40 Indonesian boys in jails in Australia.
The Indonesian consulate is investigating 16 cases of alleged minors in West Australian prisons, two in Victoria, 14 in New South Wales, one in Darwin and seven in Queensland.
One of the longest detentions involves a 16-year-old boy named Ardi. He spent one and a half years in custody before his lawyer managed to obtain enough evidence to prove Ardi was a minor. He was then transferred from an adult prison to an immigration detention centre in Darwin, and from there he was supposed to be sent home.
But Radio National's Background Briefing program has discovered that almost two months later, Ardi was still in detention, despite having no charges against him.
Ardi's lawyer David Svoboda says he demanded the immediate release of his client. He says the next day, a Department of Immigration official told him Ardi would be on a plane to Indonesia the same day.
Mr Svoboda says he believes that if he had not made those inquiries, Ardi may have remained in detention indefinitely.
"Almost 24 hours after I made inquiries, I'm suddenly told that he went home. More than a coincidence I would have thought," he said. "There seems to be a general attitude amongst the authorities here that it's OK for these boys to languish in jail."
Mr Svoboda has also represented a number of Indonesian children accused of people smuggling, who were sent to Arthur Gorrie prison in Brisbane.
'Jail nearly killed me'
Another one of the boys is 15-year-old Ose Lani, who accepted an offer in April last year to crew a refugee vessel headed to Ashmore Island.
He says he was in a fish market when a man approached him with a $500 job offer. Ose Lani says he did not know the nature of the work, and only realised he was involved in transporting immigrants to Australia when he saw people boarding his boat.
"When I got to the place where the people were, I did not know what place it was. I was on the boat," he said. "I asked myself, 'what kind of place is this?' But I just followed along. I went wherever they told to me to go."
The boat was intercepted by Australian authorities and Ose Lani was sent to a juvenile detention centre in Darwin. There, a Department of Immigration official assessed Ose Lani to be a child.
Despite this, the Australian Federal Police charged the boy, based on a wrist X-ray analysis that it said determined the boy was over 18.
Ose Lani was then sent to an adult prison in Brisbane. "Jail nearly killed me. That was the first and last time for me," he said.
Ose Lani was released and returned home after lawyers went to his village, in the Eastern Indonesian archipelago's Rote Island and obtained evidence to show that he and two other village boys also in jail with him were all minors.
Lawyer Mark Plunkett, who argued the case in court, says jailing Indonesian children is against Australia's international treaty obligations.
"I said in court, that the Commonwealth were guilty of institutionalised child abuse. This was cruelty to children," he said. "When we went to jail, it was plain just by a simple observation that this little boy crying across the counter was a child."
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