francesca da rimini on Tue, 11 Jun 2002 00:38:52 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Children Placed in Punishment Compound |
hi A couple of points of clarification for this discussion, using info from the recently published "National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention" prepared by the Australian Federal Government's Dept of Immigration & Multicultural Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/children_detention/index.html SNIP > My question is not a moral one, rather a practical > one. The Australian Government (Or whoever is ultimately overseeing this) is obviously doing an awful job. Australia now has a policy of Mandatory Detention of "unlawful non-citizens" This policy is administered by DIMIA for "administrative [not correctional] purposes as part of the approach to "the integrity of Australia's entry arrangements" The management of the 8 major detention centres has been outsourced to Australian Correctional Management Pty Ltd (ACM), a subsidiary of the security giant Group 4 Falck. SNIP > But simply saying "the dreaded Oscar(sp?) Compound" > is too easily > dismissed. What exactly happens there that is > detrimental? (not from the DIMIA report but from the Sydney Morning Herald) ..Following inspections around the country of the detention centres last week the head of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Louis Joinet... "privately told welfare groups he had not seen a more gross abuse of human rights in more than 40 inspections of mandatory detention facilities around the world. " There is a wealth of documented complaints and eyewitness accounts which support Mr Joinet's judgement, some of which will be used by South Australian lawyers later this year when they will challenge the constitutional lawfullness of placing people in mandatory detention. SNIP > But back to Woomera, these refugees aren't faced > with the same situation we are. And have very different needs. I assume there are very limited resources (money, can Australia support a large influx of population who will need jobs, housing, etc) The policy of Mandatory Detention is currently directed at the existing (as of 12 april 02) 1,618 people currently in detention, and to any others who arrive on our shores (status of the 1000s of recently excised islands to the north a bit unclear right now). Most of these people have arrived on australian territory by boat. The majority have come from Iran (343), Afghanistan (288) and Iraq (133) 256 of the 1,618 have been in detention for over 18 months. 28 of those 256 are minors. The policy is clearly not directed at 60,000 (sixty thousand) people who as of june 30 2001 were unlawfully in australia having outstayed their visas. Obviously Australia's resources are very elastic. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net