The Christmas Island detention centre.
Chris Evans, the Australian Minister for Immigration and Citizenship has sparked a row by allowing ten Afghan refugees into the country without visas.
The ten boys have been detained on Christmas Island since May 7. Christmas Island is currently used as a detention facility and now houses 665 people in immigration detention, 571 of which are single men. However women and children are also housed there and last night the Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre welcomed Mr Evans’ decision saying that it was “a substantial departure from the previous policy of condemning everyone including children to detention on Christmas Island.�
However Mr Evans denies that this move represents any change in policy saying: “this makes no change to their legal status. They’re offshore entry persons.� In an interview with ABC he said that the ten boys were not the only ones to have been moved to the mainland because of extenuating circumstances: “I took a decision based on concerns about their vulnerability that they’d come ashore a bit earlier. We’ve done it in other cases…even the Howard Government did it in other cases.�
The boys arrived on the island without parents or guardians and are now being held in immigration facilities in Melbourne. The boys are in the final stages of their visa processing.
Two months ago the department made a similar decision when they allowed a Kurdish man off the island and into community detention in Melbourne after he was found to be suffering from depression.
Australia has a highly criticised reputation when it comes to detaining refugees, being the only developed country to detain all asylum seekers on entry.
The Christmas Island detention centre was re-opened last year to a barrage of criticism from human rights groups.
The maximum time for a refugee to be detained was meant to be 90 days, but as Mr Evans admitted today, the ten boys released onto the mainland had been on the island since May 7, that’s a total of 119 days and the boys are still in the final stages of having their visas processed. Many have to wait in detention longer than that only to have their applications rejected.
The Department of Immigration and Citizenship may well be responding to a call by Amnesty International in May of this year to release all children being held on Christmas Island. They say that the government failed to keep their promise that only refugees deemed to be a risk would be kept in detention.
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