Late in 2023 the federal court ordered $27.5m in compensation for an estimated 220 Indonesian children who were wrongly detained as adult people smugglers between 2010 and 2012.
The children were wrongly deemed to be adults by federal police, who relied on a wildly inaccurate technique using interpretations of wrist X-rays to determine age.
In fact the children were as young as 12, and should have been sent home to Indonesia in line with Australian government policy. They were instead sent to immigration detention and Australian jails, including, in many cases, maximum-security adult jails, where they languished for years until the error was discovered.
The imprisonment of the Indonesians was caused, in part, by the use of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, introduced by the Howard government, which compelled courts to hand out five-year prison terms for people smuggling.
Many of the children were duped into crewing the people-smuggling boats. They were from impoverished areas of Indonesia and were often given vague offers of work on boats, transporting cargo or livestock, only to find themselves transporting people to unknown locations.
Labor has had a longstanding position of opposition to mandatory sentencing laws because of the risk they would “lead to unjust outcomes” and are “often discriminatory in practice”.
That changed this month when it decided, contrary to its 2023 policy platform, to back mandatory sentencing for hate speech, part of its attempt to respond to antisemitism.
Documents obtained by Guardian Australia in the class action case show the Indonesian children repeatedly told immigration and police that they were children. The dates of birth they gave were altered – keeping the month and day but changing the year – to ensure their ages matched what had been suggested by the flawed wrist X-ray assessments.
Separately to the class action, half a dozen of the children have had their criminal convictions in the Western Australian courts quashed, with the court finding “a substantial miscarriage of justice has occurred”.
Source: The Guardian