The people smugglers

Now the result of the government repeatedly ignoring every legal expert and human rights organisation is the country is:

1. Ali Jasmin, aged 13 on arrival, deemed to be 19 based only on a wrist x-ray taken by a gastroenterologist with no bone x-ray experienceand on the test which is itself discredited.

2. And then in February 2010, a teenager named Ardi headed down to the water. That is his only name. He is 16, he believes, although he has no way of confirming it. Few people here have more than a basic education -- Ardi made it to Year 3 -- which makes reading a luxury, and legal documentation like birth certificates a rarity. He is an orphan, too.

3. Then there is the case of Ose and Ako Lani and John Ndollu.

4. And finally an intellectually disabled orphan from Pantar Island near Timor, found to be a teenager who was freed after nearly two years in an adult Sydney prison.

These children are all in adult prisons in breach of the law that says children should not be jailed but sent home. None of them had a lawyer prepared to enter their birth certificates in court because they are not nice and modern like ours, none of the judges noticed they were dealing with very young teenage boys, none of the prison guards spoke out, not one person pointed out in the media or courts that they were jailing children as young as 13.

To make it worse instead of using the smuggling protocol to protect those who merely assist refugees in their legal travels to seek asylum the government are keeping these children and hundreds of adults in prisons without charge until all refugee cases are settled.

Why you ask? Because until the claims have been settled the refugees who come by sea are not deemed to have entered Australia because they arrive at an island which is outside Australia for the purposes of the Migration Act. It is only when they arrive in Australia on an Australian jumbo, courtesy of the Australian people, that they are deemed to have entered Australia and it is only then that the Indonesians are charged with smuggling.

As the Perth Chief Justice stated in March: it is risible to call it people smuggling".

But the government is so determined to "send a message" now 16 year old Ali Jasmin rots in Albany prison with murderers and rapists.