Submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention

The Castan Centre for Human Rights Law welcomes the opportunity to make a submission to the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. The Centre is concerned with the promotion and protection of human rights. The human rights of children seeking asylum have been the subject of our longstanding concern.The Australian Human Rights Commission noted in its 2004 report on children in immigration detention, A Last Resort, that Australia’s policy of mandatory immigration detention was fundamentally inconsistent with the Convention on the Rights of the Child(CRC), failing to comply with a range of its obligations. Ten years on, Australia continues to subject children to essentially the same policy of mandatory immigration detention in violation of its international human rights obligations. Our submission will focus on two areas: it will consider the detention of children in the immigration detention facility of Nauru and provide a comparative analysis of Australia’s detention of children in contrast to that of States in the European Union.