Immigration bungles lead to detention center shake-up in Australia

Asian Political News, May 31, 2005

SYDNEY, May 26 Kyodo

As the number of bungles by Australia's immigration department increases, the government is being forced to reconsider its detention center system.

Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone told reporters Thursday she has referred 201 cases of possible wrong detention to former Australian federal police Chief Mick Palmer.

The investigation comes in the wake of a case involving a mentally ill Australian resident, Cornelia Rau, who was mistakenly held in detention for 10 months, and the bungled case of Vivian Alvarez -- an Australian citizen who was wrongfully deported to the Philippines.

Vanstone said the government has asked Palmer to provide advice on how to handle the remaining caseload of potential mistakes.

''The nature of the inquiry has changed from being something that was a specific investigation into one person to now a specific investigation into another, and the particular nature that's changed is the checking of 200 other files to see if there are problems,'' Vanstone said.

She has not ruled out an inquiry with judicial powers and Palmer has called for an open and more legally powerful inquiry into the cases.

Although Kim Beazley, leader of the opposition Labor Party, has called for a royal commission into the case and the sacking of Vanstone, Prime Minister John Howard has ruled out firing the immigration minister and continues to defend Australia's existing detention policies.

The release of Malaysian Virginia Leong and her three-year-old daughter from a detention center in Sydney has also sparked a split in the Liberal Party backbenchers and raised concerns for other children locked up by the immigration department.

Leong and her daughter Naomi, who was born and has lived her entire life in detention, were released after a damning psychiatric report revealed the child may be mentally damaged by the experience.

The case has had some Liberal backbenchers calling for the release of all children in detention, despite Howard's and Vanstone's stance on the matter.

''Ideally, no children would be held in detention, but at the same time they could not be separated from their parents who were locked up,'' Vanstone told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

''And we don't want to say to people smugglers, 'If you pick customers who have children you will be able to guarantee that they can get to Australia and walk around freely,''' she said. ''But the circumstances of each family, the legal action they're involved in, the entitlements of the child might vary according to their immigration circumstances, so there isn't a simple blanket rule.''

The government agreed Wednesday to allow a Vietnamese asylum-seeking couple with a newborn to be released from a detention center in Perth to live in community detention while seeking a legal course of action, sparking outcry from another family with a child who are still in detention.

The ABC reported the mother of another three-year-old girl in an Australian detention center wants the same treatment as Leong.

''I want they give me new life (like) Naomi,'' the mother of the child told ABC radio.

She said her child had been born in detention and incarcerated for too long.

''She never saw outside, never talk (to) a lot of people,'' she said.