A coalition of church leaders, led by the Dean of St John’s Anglican Cathedral in Brisbane, has accused the Australian Government of “state-sanctioned child abuse” and called for the Immigration Minister to be stripped of his role as guardian for unaccompanied child asylum seekers.

The call came as the coalition – the Australian Council of Churches Refugee Taskforce – released a report claiming that many of the unaccompanied child asylum seekers held in closed and offshore immigration detention facilities by Australia are neglected and abused.

“These vulnerable children are being locked away behind razor wire for the ‘crime’ of being born in countries in political and social turmoil,” the Dean of Brisbane, the Very Rev Dr Peter Catt, said.

The Dean, who chairs the taskforce, continued: “It is a sick joke that under Australia’s inadequate Guardianship Act their jailor is also their guardian. These children are held like animals in conditions that are inhumane, interrogated without support or representation, shipped around the country and offshore in the middle of the night, and denied basic rights including education.

“Given the Government continues to ignore irrefutable independent evidence from health and legal experts about the plight of these children we have no hesitation in labelling this what it is – state sanctioned child abuse.”

The coalition, which includes Catholic, Uniting Churches, Baptist, Lutheran, Salvation Army, Quaker, Churches of Christ and Assyrian denominations as well as Anglicans, is calling for:

• fundamental reform of the Guardianship Act to ensure an independent guardian of unaccompanied child asylum seekers;
• the establishment of a properly resourced independent Statutory Office for the Guardianship of Minors;
• a new inquiry by the Australian Human Rights Commission into the conditions of children in community detention programs;
• the ending of offshore detention of unaccompanied minors in favour of community care in Australia; and
• the development of better care standards to end the “care lotto” – wildly varying conditions depending on provider and location.

Dr Catt said: “We gave the Minister for Immigration, Scott Morrison, and his [opposition] counterpart, Richard Marles, right of reply to the draft report we published, back in October last year. That neither politician provided substantial or satisfactory responses to the serious issues raised by the Taskforce confirms the utter moral failure of leadership in this country.”

The report, Protecting the Lonely Children: Recommendations to the Australian Government and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child with respect to unaccompanied children who seek asylum and refuge in Australia, was launched on Wednesday at St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral in Melbourne by Dr Catt alongside leading human rights lawyer David Manne and Sister Brigid Arthur, a Catholic nun who runs the Brigidine Asylum Seekers Project in Albert Park, Melbourne.

• The report can be downloaded from acrt.com.au.