Six teens lured to crew boats from their impoverished villages repeatedly told officials they were children – 12 years on, a court has finally believed them
Six Indonesian children wrongly jailed in Australia as adult people smugglers have cleared their names in a case exposing a grave and “substantial miscarriage of justice”.
Instead, police relied on the use of X-rays to interpret the maturity of their wrists, comparing them to a reference tool built using the bones of healthy, middle-class Americans. The X-rays were used to conclude that the boys were likely to be adults, and police charged them as such. All but one of the boys pleaded guilty.
“The Crown has conceded that a miscarriage of justice was occasioned by each of the convictions; the judgments of conviction should be set aside; and judgments of acquittal should be entered,” the court said. Despite those concerns, police altered the dates of birth provided to them by the six children – changing the year of birth, but keeping the month and date – to turn them into adults and make their ages fit the X-ray reports.
After about three years and multiple complaints about the detention of children in adult jails, they were released on licence and sent home. “I concluded that these agencies wanted to be seen to be bringing prosecutions and securing significant penalties,’’ she said. “They wanted to be seen to be taking people-smuggling seriously.
“Many of them appeared to have had no idea what they were part of; they were already out at sea when they learned that passengers were on board, they couldn’t get back, there was then nothing they could do. The ringleaders in all of this were, by the time the vessels reached Australian waters, far away.
“This is a political decision, of course. The people who wrote these laws in the 1990s, who rewrote them in 2010, they knew what they were doing.”
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