On Monday a white van pulled off the Old Whyalla Rd near Port
Augusta, at the top of South Australia's Spencer Gulf, and slipped
through the electrified fences of the Baxter Immigration Reception and
Processing Centre. Filmed and photographed by news crews who would flash the visit
across the nation, the van drove back out, turned right, and started on
the trip back to Adelaide, 275km to the south.
Court rule over children tested
Two of the five children on board had made this trip before, under
very different circumstances: Alamdar Bakhtiyari, 15, and his brother
Muntazer, 13, made world headlines last year when they arrived
dramatically in Melbourne to seek asylum at the British consulate, weeks
after escaping from the now-closed Woomera detention centre during a
mass breakout. This time they are travelling legally in a van driven by Dale West,
South Australian director of the Catholic welfare agency Centacare, and
Iranian film-maker Mojgan Khadeem, heading for an uncertain freedom.
With them are sisters Nejina, 11, Famina, 9, and Amina 6, all of whom
have lived behind wire in Outback Australia since the boat carrying them
from Indonesia was intercepted in January 2001.
Their mother, Roqia, is also in Adelaide under medical care after
complications with the pregnancy of her sixth child, but will be
returned to Baxter and in December appear in court on charges of
escaping from Woomera in the attack by activists that tore down wire and
released detainees. The children's father, Ali, is also back in detention after living in
Sydney as an Afghani refugee fleeing the Taleban regime, before being
determined by immigration officials to be a Pakistani with no claim to
asylum in Australia. The family, barring some legal miracle, will eventually be deported.
But the Bakhtiyaris have struck a sensitive chord in Australia,
resonating for different reasons among both those who support the
Government's unremitting stand against people who arrive illegally, and
those who abhor the policy that places them in mandatory detention.
Their apparent attempt to deceive Australia is seen by Canberra as
vindication of its policies; the desperation of the family, and the
conditions of incarceration that saw one of the boys stitch his lips
together and another attempt suicide, are touchstones for opponents of
the detention camps.
But the Bakhtiyari children became more than a symbol when they were
released from detention by order of the Family Court in a ruling that
has huge implications for Australia's handling of illegal immigrants. The court has ruled that it has jurisdiction under federal law over
children in detention and can make and enforce orders concerning their
welfare, overriding the authority of immigration laws and the
determinations of Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock. Ruling on an application on behalf of the Bakhtiyaris, the court
found in June that the indefinite detention of children was unlawful and
ordered their release in a landmark decision contested and delayed until
Monday. Ruddock intends challenging the Family Court's jurisdiction in the
High Court next month, and has lashed out at judges who block Government
policy. “Judges are unelected and they're in effect determining policy,
rather than establishing what the law is,” he told ABC radio.
Opponents do not question the Government's right to maintain strict
immigration laws, but are appalled at the policy of mandatory detention
— especially of children — and at the impact on young lives of months,
sometimes years, behind razor wire.
Legal advice prepared for critics of mandatory detention has
consistently held that the policy breaches both Australian law,
international human rights treaties, and the United Nations Convention
on the Rights of the Child. The UN has attacked the policy and the
camps, and their failings have been documented in more than 25 reports
in the past five years.
Australia's Human Rights Commissioner, Sev Ozdowski, told a federal
parliamentary inquiry that the detention centres were like mental
hospitals without proper facilities, in which the detainees “are really
people who have lost all hope”.
In an earlier report Ozdowski attacked the logic of the centres:
“It
is wrong to suggest that the integrity of the border protection system
is threatened by the small, sad, flotilla of leaky boats with their
desperately fragile cargo of asylum seekers,” he said. “We can maintain
a system of visas and identity, security and health checks without
stomping all over our 'fair go' heritage.”
Much has improved over the past two years in the detention centres,
with the closure of the infamous camps at Curtin in northwest Australia
and at Woomera, north of Port Augusta, and new emphasis on medical and
psychological care.
Families have been allowed to live in secure communities outside the
wire, and an expanding programme has seen the children of detained
families attending nearby schools, as the Bakhtiyaris will be doing in
Adelaide.
Baxter, where the Bakhtiyaris and fellow inmates moved when Woomera
was closed, is the largest and most imposing of the detention centres,
built on defence land bordered on one side by the mangroves of the
Spencer Gulf and on the other by plains sweeping across to the imposing
Flinders Ranges. But detainees see nothing of this.
Built to accommodate 880 people — but at present housing fewer than a
quarter of this — the centre is designed around nine separate compounds
of transportable units, all facing inwards. When opened, Ruddock described its facilities as "three star": each
compound comprises air conditioned, en suite rooms, mostly of bunks,
with a large central dining room, two recreation rooms, a laundry,
playground and sports equipment, a nurse's station and two pay phones.
The accommodation compounds are ringed by cameras, microwave movement
detectors and chainmesh fences. Encircling the camp is another wall of
cameras and motion detectors. The outer fence is electrified, pulsing 9000 volts through the wire
at 6-8 amps — sufficient, official documents say, to give a “short,
sharp, harmless shock similar in sensation to the static discharge
sometimes experienced when opening a car door, but more intense”.
But for the Family Court, and an army of other critics, the most
pressing issue is the impact of prolonged incarceration of children,
about of 100 of who remain inside the nation's detention centres.
A 15-year-old boy told former nurse Barbara Rogalla:
“Everybody told me that Australia was a good country and people were
kind. My father sent me away to save my life. But they persecute me here
in Australia ... The guards say to me 'Australian people do not want
you'. I am dying inside every day in detention, with no hope.
By Greg Ansley
1 September 2003
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3520796&thesection=news&thesubsection=world
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