"We are still checking the validity of these reports," the Foreign Affairs Ministry`s Director for Protection and Legal Aid for Indonesian Nationals Tatang Budie Razak said here on Tuesday.
The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on Tuesday reported that three boys snatched by people smugglers from a poor Indonesian village have been held for months in an Australian jail together with hardened criminals.
Federal police had ignored Immigration Department assessments and extracts of birth certificates showing the boys were under 18, contravening federal government policy to return children apprehended on asylum seeker boats.
Instead, the boys - aged 15 and 16 who were cooks and deck hands on an asylum-seeker boat - face five years` jail in a high security adult jail under harsh mandatory sentencing laws.
Shivering with cold, Ako Lani, a 16-year-old orphan, convulsed in tears and could not speak when his lawyers asked him in Brisbane`s high security Arthur Gorrie jail on May 30 whether he was being mistreated by prisoners.
Sixty Indonesian crew members who claim to be under 18 are being treated as adults in jails and immigration detention centres across Australia after wrist X-ray examinations that police say prove they are not children.
But defence lawyers citing a number of studies and judicial rulings say the X-rays are unreliable and inadequate to determine the ages of children.
Fourteen months after Ose Lani, 15, and Ako Lani and John Ndollu, both 16, were detained on an asylum-seeker boat near Ashmore Reef no Australian police or immigration officials have contacted anybody in Manamolo, the boys` village on Roti Island, to establish their ages.
No official has informed family the boys are in an Australian jail.
"The three boys went fishing one day and never returned. We thought they had been lost at sea," Albert Lani, father of Ose Lani, said. Mr Lani wept when Margaret Bocquet-Siek, a volunteer interpreter phoned him from Brisbane last month to say his son was alive. "Ose`s father was crying with relief - the boy was only 14 when he left the village," Dr Bocquet-Siek said.
Mark Plunkett, a Brisbane barrister, and Tony Sheldon, an Indonesia expert, have gathered affidavits in the village that prove all three boys are under 18.
Lawyers have obtained extracts of birth certificates confirming that Ose Lani is 15 and John Ndollu is 16. A birth certificate showing Ako Lani is 16 is being sent from Indonesia.
But prosecutors say it will take weeks, if not months, for police to verify the evidence, leaving the boys vulnerable to abuse in a jail that houses some of Queensland`s worst offenders.
A Department of Immigration interviewer reported last October that on balance all three boys were believed to be under 18, but their lawyers had not been told about the assessment for more than six months.
The boys were arrested, manacled and flown to the Brisbane jail in January.(*)
(T.A051/HAJM/f001)
Editor: Ruslan Burhani
Copyright © ANTARA 2011
