Australia Still Detaining Asylum Seekers Body

The report called for Australia`s mandatory detention laws to be repealed.

Australia continues to detain asylum seekers in prison-like centres despite promises by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's one-year-old government to close offshore detention centres and not detain children.

The Australian Human Rights Commission's annual report on detention found the Rudd government had not made the changes to Australia's detention policy it had announced in July 2008.

"Our report shows we are still seeing children being held in detention facilities, people being detained for prolonged and indefinite periods and dilapidated detention centres being used for accommodation," said Human Rights Commissioner Graeme Innes.

"We also have the disturbing reality that the massive prison-like Christmas Island facility is open for business," said Innes while releasing the report on Tuesday.

The Rudd government opened the Christmas Island detention facility in the Indian Ocean in December 2008 after a spate of boatpeople arrivals. The human rights report recommends that Christmas Island be shut.

Innes said he had serious concerns that, despite the end of the former conservative government's "Pacific solution" of detaining asylum seekers on Pacific island centres, asylum seekers were still being detained on Christmas Island -- about 1,500 km (930 miles) west of Australia's northern mainland.

"The islands' isolation makes it difficult for external groups from the mainland to monitor what is going on there, and the island community is so small that detainees find it very hard to access basic services," Innes said in a statement.

Innes was also concerned that, while children were no longer held in immigration detention centres, they were held in other closed detention facilities on the mainland and Christmas Island.

"The time is now for the government to amend Australia's immigration laws to ensure they comply with the Convention on the Rights of the Child," he said.

"Detention of children in any type of immigration detention facility should only be used as an absolute last resort."

The report called for Australia's mandatory detention laws to be repealed. It cited one detainee who had been held for more than six years, despite the government's policy upon election in November 2007 that detention would be a last resort.

When the Commission began visiting centres in June 2008, there were 302 people in immigration detention centres. When it completed its visits in September 2008, there were 198.

The report said mainland facilities, like Sydney's Villawood detention centre, were dilapidated and that older sections should be closed and centres redeveloped.

"It is shameful, not only that it remains standing, but that people are still being detained there in its utterly miserable conditions," said Innes.