Indonesian teens recall Australian jail nightmare

Updated July 21, 2012 01:15:55

Two Indonesian teenagers who were jailed in Australia as people smugglers say they were subjected to sexual harassment and drug use in Sydney's Silverwater prison.

Wearing disguises and taking on fake names, the two boys fronted local media to tell their stories.

Susilo and Bambang were 15 and 17 respectively when they were recruited to work on boats and tricked into travelling to Christmas Island.

The boys took jobs as deckhands not knowing that their cargo was going to be asylum seekers.

When they found out, they were threatened and coerced into staying on the boat and going through with the mission to Christmas Island.

They say they told Australian authorities their age, but the Government used wrist X-rays to claim the boys were adults and imprisoned them with adult criminals and drug users.

They say they were strip-searched, sexually humiliated and witnessed drug use in Silverwater jail.

It took more than a year of detention for 15-year-old Susilo to be recognised as a minor and returned to Indonesia late last year.

When he arrived at Silverwater, Suslio was placed with the prison's mentally ill patients. He was then moved into rooms with men who took drugs in the cell he was in.

He said after he complained about the drug use to prison officials he was moved to another cell.

The boys took more than an hour to tell their stories, with one of them breaking down multiple times as they gave a blow-by-blow description of their ordeal.

They were sexually humiliated. When they were strip-searched they were made fun of and there was a lot of that sort of thing that went on; men showing themselves to the boys in the shower and making comments. They said they were quite intimidated and threatened.

[Susilo] said that they complained about the drug use to the prison officials and he did actually manage to get moved to a different cell. But there were some quite harrowing stories these two boys explaining their situation.

Indonesia correspondent George Roberts

Rights abuse

The Human Rights Working Group says Australia has breached the United Nations convention on protecting the rights of the child and is vowing to pursue the Federal Government.

The group says it is determined to prove that the boys suffered exposure to sexual harassment and drug use, and that they were wrongly imprisoned in Australia.

The boys have not made any compensation demands.

During a visit to Australia early this month, Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called on Australia to accelerate the release of underage crew members caught on people smuggling boats.

The Federal Government had reviewed the cases of 28 Indonesian crew members who had been prosecuted in Australia on people smuggling offences.

Fifteen were released because of concerns about their age.

The review was prompted by requests from Indonesia and the Australian Human Rights Commission following public concerns about the X-ray technology used to determine age.

A spokesman for the Immigration Department says that because the minors were crew and not seeking asylum, their cases were handed over to the Australian Federal Police.

The department would not reveal how long the two Indonesians were held in immigration detention, saying it does not discuss individual cases.

The Australian Federal Police, for its part, says it has nothing to do with it either and refers all matters to the Attorney-General.

In a statement, Attorney-General Nicola Roxon says the allegations are difficult to verify but will be thoroughly investigated by NSW corrections authorities.

Topics: prisons-and-punishment, immigration, indonesia, silverwater-2128, nsw, sydney-2000

First posted July 20, 2012 16:44:14