Australia: Plight of child refugees -- Child refugees' rights are trampled in Australian immigration detention.

Journalist Fiona Broom wrote this op-ed about refugee children who are sent to detention on an isolated island off Australia.

Ten years after Australia's human rights commission found the country breached its international obligations towards children in immigration detention, a recently-announced new inquiry will find no change in the treatment of the most vulnerable of refugees.

Australian governments, with an international legal obligation as signatories to the Convention on the Rights of the Child to act with the best interests of the child, including ensuring access to education and health services, and to only detain children when no other option is available, have denied child refugees humanitarian protection.

And the situation shows no sign of being turned around. On Sunday February 16, 10 unaccompanied children were sent to offshore detention on the remote Pacific island of Nauru by their legally-appointed guardian, the Australian immigration minister.

The human rights commissioner Gillian Triggs said she had to call the inquiry because the government will not co-operate in providing information about mental health and self-harm among the more than 1,600 children in detention.

Now the government has denied Professor Triggs access to the Nauru detention centre on the grounds it is out of her jurisdiction of Australia's borders.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/02/australia-plight-child-refugees-201421985936735633.html