Aussie doctors petition gov't to release children in detention

Doctors and health professionals have renewed calls for the Australian government to immediately release all children from detention centres, with more than 3,000 signing an impassioned petition.

Associate Professor Karen Zwi, who put her name to the petition, said she had learned first hand of the health problems for young detainees when they arrived at her Sydney-based hospital.

"We feel impotent to help our young patients when the causes of their distress are because of the system they find themselves in," Zwi, head of department of community child health at Sydney Children's Hospital, told the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) on Thursday.

"And when our treatments are very unlikely to work if they know they will be returned to detention and not resettled in safe and welcoming environments."

According to the latest figures from the Human Rights Commission, 215 children were in Australian-run detention centres as of June 30 this year.

Detention centres hold refugees of all nationalities while their request for asylum is processed by the Australian government.

Zwi also visited Australia's off-shore processing centre in Nauru in order to examine children locked up on the site.

She said many of the children had spent more than 500 days waiting to be cleared for temporary or permanent residency.

"This is unbearable for most people, and more so if you are a child, and leads to severe psychological distress, and in children, developmental delay," she said.

"This is what we are seeing in our patients and we feel as professionals we have a duty of care to make this known."

Zwi faces possible prison time for speaking up about her experience on Nauru, under new Australian Border Force laws designed to stem the flow of first hand accounts from visiting doctors.

On Wednesday, the Australian government, led by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, was facing pressure to allow debate on a bill passed last month by the Senate, which if passed could have all children from on-shore detention centres released before the end of the month.

But this would exclude off-shore centres like Nauru and Papua New Guinea's (PNG) Manus Island, where as many of 88 children were being held at last check. Endit