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Australia detains Taiwanese child despite citizenship

In the latest in a series of immigration detention scandals rocking the Australian government, a 22-month-old boy of Taiwanese extraction is reported to have been locked up for 18 months in a Sydney detention center together with his Taiwanese mother, even though the boy is an Australian citizen.

The Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) reported that the boy, Peter, is the son of Huang Shu-lin and an Australian man.

Huang was reported to be in custody with not only Peter, who was apparently born in Australia, but also four of her children by her Taiwanese ex-husband, who is also in detention at the Villawood complex in southwestern Sydney.

The ABC said that the family arrived in Australia more than two years ago and were detained 18 months ago.

A Taipei Economic and Cultural Office spokesman told the ABC that Australia's Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs had informed the office three months ago that it was attempting to locate Peter's father.

The spokesman, Osman Chia, said that Peter was not a Taiwanese national and could not be issued with travel documents to leave the country.

"According to Peter's birth certificate, the father ... is somebody called Chapman. He's an Australian. So we're not able to provide Peter's travel documents," the ABC quoted Chia as saying.

The report comes as the department reviews hundreds of possibly irregular cases of detention that have helped prompt a number of government lawmakers to defy Australian Prime Minister John Howard's hard line on illegal immigrants.

The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday reported that the immigration department had been informed by a local immigration official last November that a mentally ill German-born woman, Cornelia Rau, who was detained at the remote Baxter detention center for illegal immigrants in South Australia, was possibly an Australian citizen.

No action appears to have been taken at the time.
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