Australia offers $17m payout to Indonesian children jailed as adults

A significant class action lawsuit has been resolved by more than 120 Indonesians who claim that Australia wrongfully imprisoned them as people when they were actually kids.

The victims, who were imprisoned and, in some cases, charged as people pirates, have agreed to receive more than A$ 27m(£ 14m,$ 17m ) from the state.

Some of the kids were as young as 12 when they were detained.

The case is the most recent in a series connected to the American government’s policies on asylum seekers.

Sam Tierney, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, said,” It’s fair to say we’re happy to have gotten this goal … this has been in the making for ten times.”

Between 2009 and 2012, the majority of the candidates involved in the class action lawsuit were held on Christmas Island or in Darwin after arriving in Australia on people-smuggling ships.

They claim that as young children, they were seduced onto the boats by offers of well-paying work, conscious of their intended destination or the fact that they would be used to carry asylum seekers.

Any team members of those boats who were discovered to get children at the time should have been sent back to their home countries rather than facing charges under American law.

However, in order to establish the children’s age, officials used a now-discredited wrist X-ray analysis and imprisoned anyone they believed to be older than 18.

Colin Singer, one of the prison guards who assisted in the case’s investigation, stated to the BBC in 2018 that he thought the Indian state” didn’t want to do anything” to assist the kids and that the American government had” knowingly” imprisoned them.

Many violations of the boys’ rights were also discovered in a historic report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, which claimed their cases had been handled incorrectly.

The main claim, Mr. Ali Jasmin, also charged carelessness and racial bias against American officials involved in his situation.

In recent years, the American government has resolved a number of unjust detention cases.

In 2017, it consented to pay nearly 1,700 refugees and asylum seekers$ 70 million in restitution for imprisoning them illegally on Manus Island in hazardous conditions.

Five years later, it also resolved a case involving an Iraqi asylum seeker who was found to have been held illegally in an immigration detention facility for more than two years and received an A$ 350,000 payout.

Before it can be paid out, the Federal Court must give its final approval to Thursday’s arrangement, which is not an admission of crime.