Immigration apologises to former detainees

The Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) will apologise to a group of former Villawood Immigration Detention Centre detainees about arrangements it made for their identification interviews in the centre in 2005.

In May and June 2005, the department arranged for Chinese government officials to interview the 68 Chinese nationals to establish their identity.

Of the former detainees, 26 lodged complaints with the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) about the arrangements and the AHRC report about the complaints has been tabled in Federal Parliament today.

“The department accepts the report’s recommendations in full, including paying compensation to complainants,” a DIAC spokesman said.

“It should be noted the interviews were conducted in 2005, before the Palmer and Comrie reports and the subsequent reforms within the department.

“Since that time, the department has made significant changes to its processes and policy, particularly around the investigation of identity.

“The department has changed the way it arranges and conducts identification interviews involving officials of foreign governments. The department will exhaust all other means of ascertaining people’s identity before considering conducting such interviews and the department will not conduct such interviews, now or in the future, in the same way in which these interviews took place.”

The AHRC was not critical of the department arranging the interviews or providing Chinese government officials with information to help with identification. The AHRC found the department had a legitimate purpose for arranging the interviews – to end the people’s detention and facilitate their removal from Australia – and that the interviews were a reasonable means of achieving that purpose.

However, the AHRC considered that the way in which the interviews were conducted breached the human rights of the detainees.

Based on the recommendations of the AHRC, the department has so far offered compensation to 23 complainants for which it holds current Australian residential addresses and is pursuing contact details for the remaining complainants.

Complainants are being offered between $4000 and $9000 in compensation.

None of the 68 detainees interviewed remain in immigration detention. // Dept of Immigration and Citizenship

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Posted by TFA News Research on Mar 20 2009. Filed under Immigration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry