Six children jailed as adults for acting as crew on people-smuggling boats have had their convictions quashed. But Australian authorities had been told before they were jailed of doubts about the wrist X-ray technique used to prove they were over 18
A bare few miles inside Australian waters, the dark nearly absolute, a small fishing vessel sat low in the ocean, waiting to be boarded by the Australian navy.
Husa told the Australians he just wanted to go home. That’s exactly where he should have been sent, according to federal police policy on juvenile people smugglers. “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.It has exposed hundreds of pages of internal records, which for the first time reveal the full story of Australia’s shocking conduct, including the extent to which police knew there were questions about the accuracy of the evidence they were using to prosecute the children as adults.
Seven years later, his evidence in a similar prosecution would be criticised by appeal judges as “unsatisfactory and unreliable” and as having “no acceptable basis in fact”. The new dates, described by the boys’ lawyers in court as “fictitious”, were used on sworn legal documents.
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