The royal commission into child sexual abuse is to hold limited public hearings on Australia’s immigration detention regime on Nauru and Manus Island.
The royal commission had initially declined to conduct investigations into Manus and Nauru because of jurisdictional concerns about the scope of the inquiry’s powers. Legal groups had urged the royal commission to examine Australia’s offshore immigration detention regime, outlining legal advice that Australia’s institutional response to allegations of abuse were within its power and terms of reference.
The commission appears to have partially adopted this approach, announcing the limited public hearing into the Australian government’s response to report of a child protection panel convened by the immigration minister, Peter Dutton.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the royal commission said its final scheduled public hearing in March would examine the Australian government’s response to the report.
“On 14 November 2016 the royal commission announced a series of public hearings to be held in Sydney to inquire into the current policies and procedures relating to child protection and child safety of various institutions,” the statement said.
It said the hearings would include: “The response of the commonwealth government to the recommendations of the child protection panel in its report dated 11 May 2016, ‘Making Children Safer – the wellbeing and protection of children in immigration detention and regional processing centres’.”
The child protection panel identified serious inadequacies in Australia’s child protection framework in the immigration detention system on Manus and Nauru. It found almost half of the responses to reported incidents of child abuse were inadequate and the immigration department was unsure of the number, nature and severity of incidents.
The panel made a series of recommendations including to improve categorisation of incidents, to require service providers to deliver accurate and complete incident reports, and to ensure inquiries were not finalised without all available facts and an effective response.
There has been renewed focus on the asylum seekers and refugees held on Nauru by Australia after the Guardian’s publication of the Nauru files, which detailed thousands of incident reports from the island’s detention facility until October 2015.
A Senate inquiry is also under way into serious allegations of abuse and assault on Nauru and the department is facing increasing pressure to release information about incident reports, as well as healthcare information for asylum seekers and refugees on the island.
The royal commission’s limited hearings will still not fully examine the detention regime on Manus Island and Nauru. They will occur as part of a set of hearings into other areas of government responses, including the defence department and the management of working with children’s checks.
The commission has made substantial inquiries into the onshore immigration detention regime, but declined to hold public hearings.
The hearings will begin in March.
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