The Jakarta Post, Jakarta Wed, 10/19/2011 7:29 AM
As many as 19 Indonesian boys have returned home after being released from prison in Australia.
They had been detained for their alleged involvement in helping illegal immigrants land on Australian territory.
Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said that some 40 other Indonesian children were still waiting for completion of their age-verification process before being freed from jail.
Under an Australian federal government policy, suspects under 18 years old should not be charged with people smuggling and should be sent home immediately. “Nineteen children have been returned to [Indonesia]: seven from Christmas Island and 12 from [mainland] Australia,” Marty told the House of Representatives on Thursday as quoted by detik.com news portal.
“There are still 40 others who are waiting for verification of their status as children.” He said that all those who appeared to be children should be removed from adult jails while awaiting age verification — an agreement he said that he and his Australian counterpart Kevin Rudd had reached.
Contrary to Marty’s claim, human rights campaigners in Australia said that nearly 100 Indonesian boys were still being held in Australian prisons awaiting prosecution for people smuggling, ABC News reported.
Critics said that Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s administration seemed to apply double standards when it came to the treatment of minors in prison.
Criminal-defense lawyer and human-rights campaigner Edwina Lloyd said, as quoted by ABC News, that the Australian government paid high-level attention to a 14-year-old Australian boy who was under arrest in Bali on drugs charges.
“The Australian boy is arrested in Bali and suddenly it’s all action stations for the government, Julia Gillard making personal phone calls to this young boy in a police cell in Indonesia,” Lloyd said.
“But what about the nearly 100 children who are languishing for years in our jails?”
She said that many of the boys were from villages where birth-certificate documentation did not exist.
“No child anywhere around the world should be in an adult jail,” she said.
“The Australian Federal Police should be using their resources to contact the families of these young Indonesians in Indonesia and obtain affidavits or some other evidence of their age from the families.”
Another lawyer who provides legal aid to Indonesian children arrested in Australia, Mark Plunkett, said that the Indonesian Consulate General in Sydney and the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra had tried hard to rescue those who were more likely to be children, but that Australian police had been “negligent” by not looking for affidavit evidence, such as birth certificates, to prove whether those arrested were children.
“In the old days, police would send them home, but now they are arresting and convicting them. They put them in jail,” Brisbane-based Plunkett told The Jakarta Post over the phone.
(and about "bloody time" too, says old Kesas in his best Australian!)
wo 19 okt 2011 - 1:16