Fifteen of Australia’s peak health professional organisations have jointly called for the government to release all children and their families from immigration detention, and for an independent panel of doctors to oversee the healthcare of children detained.
A statement from the 15 organisations – including the Australian Medical Association, the Australian Psychological Society, and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians – said the government should immediately release all children from immigration detention in Australia and Nauru to prevent “further unnecessary and long-lasting harm to children in their care”.
“Our organisations represent a wide range of health professionals who have seen, first-hand, the devastating impact of detention on the health and wellbeing of children and their families,” the organisations’ joint statement said.
The statement follows the release in February of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s report into children in detention, “The Forgotten Children”, which found that “prolonged, mandatory detention of asylum seeker children causes them significant mental and physical illness and developmental delays”. The report called for a royal commission into the treatment of asylum seeker children in detention.
The peak health bodies’ statement said there was “a moral imperative” for the government to implement the recommendations of the [AHRC] report, in particular to:
- remove children and their families from detention centres onshore and offshore and release them into the Australian community, and
- urgently appoint an independent guardian for unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Australia
The health bodies also called for an independent panel of health professionals to oversee healthcare in detention facilities.
Michael Smith, from the Public Health Association of Australia, said the AHRC report found 34% of children detained in Australia and Christmas Island had mental health disorders requiring psychiatric support, compared with a proportion in the general community of less than 2%.
“Disturbingly, the commission believes the rate to be possibly even higher in Nauru. Children are reported to be self-harming in detention at very high rates, with a significant number of incidents of voluntary starvation involving children also observed. The inquiry also found evidence that children have been exposed to unacceptable levels of assault, including sexual assault and violence in detention.”
The government rejected the AHRC report as a “partisan stitch-up” and pointed out that there are one-tenth the number of children in detention now compared with under the previous government.
Tony Abbott said at the time: “The most compassionate thing you can do is stop the boats.
“Where was the Human Rights Commission when hundreds of people were drowning at sea [under Labor]?”
There are 138 children in detention in Australia, according to the latest figures, and 119 in the Australian-run detention centre on Nauru. The number of children in detention peaked in 2013 at 1,992.
But children are being held in detention much longer now than previously. The average length of detention of a child is now 17 months, the AHRC’s president, Professor Gillian Triggs, has said.
The secretary of the immigration and border protection department, Michael Pezzullo, told Senate estimates in February the vast majority of children in detention would be released within “days and weeks”, though he conceded some complex cases would take months.
Australia is the only country in the world that mandatorily detains children as a first resort. The United Nations has said this is in breach of international law, particularly the covenant on the rights of the child, to which Australia is a party.
The peak medical groups who have called for the release of all children from detention are:
Royal Australasian College of Physicians
Royal Australian College of General Practitioners
Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists
Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists
Australasian College for Emergency Medicine
Australian Medical Association
Australian Psychological Society
Public Health Association of Australia
Children’s Healthcare Australasia
Australian Association of Social Workers
Australian Medical Students for Refugee and Asylum Seeker Mental Health
Australian College of Nursing
Australian College of Mental Health Nurses
Australian College of Midwives
Maternal, Child and Family Health Nurses Australia