Sarah Stephen
Cornelia Rau is a very unlucky woman. She suffers from schizophrenia and escaped from a mental institution in Sydney last April. She was taken to a Queensland police station by Indigenous people she had been living with, but instead of checking their missing persons files to identify her, police "formed the opinion she may be a suspected non-citizen because of statements she made and the language she was speaking", a Queensland police spokesperson told the February 5 Sydney Morning Herald.
A former Qantas flight attendant, Rau has been a permanent resident since she was 18 months old. Yet she was imprisoned in South Australia's Baxter immigration detention centre, where she was held in an isolation cell for 18 hours a day. Other detainees reported that she was so terrified of being put back into this cell that it took six guards in full riot gear to force her back in and close the heavy door.
Other Baxter detainees were very concerned about Rau and after winning her trust were able to secure legal assistance on her behalf. After seven weeks of constant calls, Pamela Curr, from Melbourne's Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, reported on January 20: "All attempts to allow independent medical or psychiatric care, or asking the minister's office to intervene have failed." Though she spoke German, the German embassy also declined to assist in establishing her identity.
Having assumed for months that she was dead, Rau's family found her as a result of an article in the January 30 Melbourne Age. The family is baffled that the police could not establish Rau's identity.
On February 5, Sydney's Refugee Action Coalition called for Amanda Vanstone to resign as immigration minister. "This monumental stuff-up is the inevitable result of constructing a system of detention under the Migration Act that is outside the norms of Australian law and that is deliberately kept away from media and public scrutiny", said RAC spokesperson Max Phillips.
"There must be a royal commission into the whole rotten system so that its many cruelties can be exposed, those responsible held to account, and so that mandatory detention is banished from this country."
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, February 9, 2005.
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