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Breaches of Australian Children's Human Rights in Detention CentreA Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Inquiry has found that children in Australian immigration detention centres have suffered numerous and repeated breaches of their human rights. In its National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention Report- A Last Resort?, tabled in Federal Parliament today, the Commission found Australia's immigration detention policy has failed to protect the mental health of children, failed to provide adequate health care and education and failed to protect unaccompanied children and those with disabilities. The two-year, comprehensive Inquiry also found that the mandatory detention system breached the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It failed, as required by the Convention, to make detention a measure of "last resort", for the "shortest appropriate period of time" and subject to independent review. The system failed to make the "best interests of the child" a primary consideration in detaining them and it failed to treat them with humanity and respect. Furthermore, the Government's failure to implement repeated recommendations by mental health professionals to remove children with their parents from detention amounted to "cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment". The Report is the result of two years of careful consideration of evidence and submissions. The Inquiry visited all detention centres in Australia and took evidence from a vast range of individuals and organizations - detainee children and parents, human rights advocacy groups, medical and legal experts, State governments, Australasian Correctional Management (ACM) and the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) amongst others. The Commissioner called on the Government to release all remaining children within four weeks, for federal Parliament to change the law to ensure that detention is no longer the first and only resort for asylum seeker children and to ensure that decisions about the detention of children be made by an independent court. For
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