The Australian Government today dropped people smuggling charges against a 15-year-old Indonesian boy, after lawyers travelled to his village to prove he was under age. The boy was intercepted on Ashmore Reef earler this year. Australian authorities had decided was an adult by scanning his wrist bones.
The wrist scanning test is under fire by human rights activists who say it is faulty and results in children being held in adult gaols .Human rights activist Gerry Georgatos says he’s pleased to hear the outcome of this particular case but many more Indonesian children remain locked up.
Indonesians as young as thirteen are being housed in Australian adult prisons according to human rights activists.
Allegations Indonesian teens held in jail
The Western Australian Government is under pressure to release up to 20 alleged people smugglers from state prisons because of claims they are all children.
A human rights advocate claims a 16-year-old Indonesian boy is being detained in Hakea prison and is working in the prison’s laundry unit alongside sex offenders.
He was arrested in February this year and charged with people smuggling after being picked up on an asylum seeker boat on Ashmore Reef in April last year.
The Human Rights Alliance’s Gerry Georgatos says the Australian Federal Police classified the boy as an adult with the help of a discredited bone X-ray technique.
Mr Georgatos says the boy and his relatives in Indonesia claim he is only 16.
He says the teenager is worried about his safety in prison.
“What he said to myself is I am scared, I want to go home, and he said I don’t understand why everybody is calling me a liar,” he said.
“He doesn’t understand why he’s being considered to having committed a crime because all he did on that boat was just cook.”
The State Opposition is calling on the Minister for Corrective Services to free the boy.
Labor spokesman John Hyde claims up to 20 Indonesian children are currently locked in WA jails.
He says the minister Terry Redman has known about the issue for more than five months.
“It is unbelievable that the minister for prisons is not taking his role seriously,” he said.
“He’s more concerned with talking about cows in Indonesia than Indonesian children who are locked away in our adult prison.”
Mr Redman, who also has the agriculture portfolio, is visiting Indonesia to talk with officials about Australian live cattle exports.
His office has been contacted for comment.
Gerry Georgatos says he has contacted MPs but to no avail.
“I’ve gone to parliamentarians, I’ve gone to every relevant authority, there are no excuses,” he said.
“If this was Australian children in prisons in Indonesia it would be an international incident and also we’ve tainted these people as people smugglers when all they actually are, are kids who have worked as deckhands or cooks on a boat.”
Boy in adult jail says he's scared
An Indonesian boy on remand in Hakea Prison has told human rights advocates he is living in fear in the adult jail.
The boy claims he is 16 and says he was born in March 1995.
Indonesian consular officials in Perth have spoken to the boy’s family, who say he had just turned 16.
He is in the adult prison awaiting people-smuggling charges after allegedly working as a cook on a boat that carried 50 asylum seekers to Ashmore Reef in June last year.
The boy is understood to be working alongside sex offenders in the prison laundry.
He has been in the prison for nearly two months.
The Australian Federal Police have declared the boy an adult and say that, on the basis of a wrist X-ray, he is 19.
Senior lecturer in Medical Imaging at Curtin University Luke Barclay said wrist X-rays were not a fail-safe measure of a person’s age.
“The approach is fraught with inaccuracies,” Mr Barclay said.
Human rights advocate Gerry Georgatos said the boy had told him he was frightened.
“His last words to me when I visited him in Hakea were: ‘I’m scared being in here’,” Mr Georgatos said.
He blew the whistle on the boy’s age after seeing him inside the prison and asking his date of birth.
Since that time Mr Georgatos, who has been visiting prisoners in the jail for the past five years, has had all of his visiting rights revoked without explanation.
Vice-consul for the Indonesian consulate in Perth Nurul Sofia Soeparan said she visited the boy and was immediately struck by how young he looked.
Ms Soeparan had contacted the boy’s family on the remote Indonesian island of Batam and was waiting for a copy of his birth certificate.
If his age is confirmed as 16, the boy will be the second Indonesian minor this year to be found languishing in the WA prison system.
In January a 16-year-old boy, who had been in jail for 12 months, was returned to Indonesia after his birth certificate was shown to a magistrate in Perth, challenging the results of a wrist X-ray used by Federal police.
Lawyers are preparing an appeal in the case of another convicted people smuggler who also says he is 16.
Mr Georgatos said scores of underage Indonesian nationals could be languishing in the prison system.
Human rights and refugee advocates have called for a reassessment of all Indonesians in Australian prisons who claim to be juveniles.
Chairwoman of Children Out of Immigration Detention Kate Gauthier said there was enough doubt over wrist X-rays to say they should not be used.
Gillard criticised for wrist X-rays
TWO of Australia’s child commissioners have backed criticism of the Gillard government’s use of wrist X-rays to determine the ages of Indonesian crew members of asylum seeker boats. Crew members face five years’ mandatory jail sentences under harsh people smuggling laws.
Victoria’s Bernie Geary and Queensland’s Elizabeth Fraser called for the appointment of a national child commissioner to help protect the rights of children facing long jail sentences in adult jails.
They made the call after Sir Al Aynsley-Green, Britain’s founding children’s commissioner, told The Age that using X-rays to assess more than 60 Indonesians in custody who claimed to be under 18 was ”unethical, inaccurate, not fit for purpose proposed and potentially unlawful”.
Sir Al, a world expert on determining the ages of children, warned that the current process of assessing age in Australia was a matter of grave concern.
Mr Geary said X-rays were a ”bizarre” way to find out the ages of vulnerable children.
”I think it shows a distinct lack of respect for their rights and I wonder how we would cope with that in the wider community,” he told ABC radio.
”I think people would probably be up in arms, so I think it’s actually pretty disrespectful.”
Ms Fraser said there was a role for a national commissioner to focus on Commonwealth policy and legislation and promotion and protection of children’s rights.
”The incarceration of children under 18 years of age in adult correctional facilities would be a matter of concern to me,” she said.
Gerry Georgatos, convener of the Human Rights Alliance, said he pleaded with Prime Minister Julia Gillard in a conversation last weekend to immediately release on bail 25 children who were being held in adult jails in Western Australia.
”Australia has not just breached the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it has shattered it,” he said.
”We have fallen in a heap on racism that we thought we were long removed from.
”It is disturbing the Prime Minister is aware of minors in our prisons and has done nothing to avoid or remedy the situation.”
Among the Indonesians facing long prison sentences in adult jails with hardened criminals are three Indonesian boys snatched by people smugglers from their impoverished village.
The Age revealed earlier this month that lawyers had obtained overwhelming evidence the boys were 15 and 16.
But federal police continue to rely on X-rays to assert they are 19 years or older.
The boys are being held at a Brisbane motel pending a trial scheduled for later this year.
Mr Georgatos called for the immediate release of a boy who has been working alongside paedophiles in Perth’s Hakea jail.
The Age has established that the boy who arrived on an asylum seeker boat in April last year turned 16 on March 16.
Federal government policy is to fly home without charge Indonesian crew members who are under 18.
