Would you support a government who imprisons innocent people while it decides their future? The most logical answer people would reply to this question is no, yet it is happening right here in Australia. Asylum seekers are forced into horrible conditions in mandatory detention while their applications for refugee status are being processed. This should be a fast procedure lasting a few months, but is some cases it is dragging on for years. What is more alarming is the fact that there are children in these detention centers, some are even unaccompanied by an adult to protect them.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) strongly discourages detaining children, but the government still continues with its mandatory detention program. When these children are detained not even their basic human rights are respected. They don't even have a chance to defend themselves in a fair hearing. What makes it worse it the fact that the children are detained for an indefinite period of time, some children may have spent most of their lives in detention.
The conditions in these centers are horrible. The children witness things that even a mature mind would have problems dealing with on a daily basis. There is no full time education system, insufficient play and leisure time, limited if any contact with the outside world. There are many other restrictions placed upon these children through, in most cases, no fault of their own. Would you let a small child watch an R rated horror movie? Well some of these kids are practically living in one.
All these asylum seekers are after is a freedom that most of us don't appreciate. They have fled their homelands in fear for their own lives. Under the laws of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), we are obliged to protect these people, not lock them up. Some individuals even have the nerve to say that the asylum seekers and refugees will destroy our culture, even though our ancestors tried to do the same to the aboriginal people.
