The country where we live: The true cost of Australia’s mandatory detention policy (2002)

by Naleya Everson

I live in a country where my fundamental rights and freedoms are enshrined and protected, where I am supported and encouraged to pursue my health and education, and actively encouraged to be involved in the freedom of democracy.

But I have discovered that within this familiar continent there exists an entirely different country for asylum seekers.

They live in a country where incarceration, without valid reason and without review is mandatory for men women and children, often for periods of time equivalent to criminal sentences for violent assault and other serious offences.

Some of the widespread misconceptions about asylum seekers, which are spun and disseminated by a government intent on vilifying some of the most vulnerable people in the world, are the misconceptions surrounding mandatory detention.

The right to seek protection

The term “illegal” used by the government has succeeded in giving Australians the impression that boat people and other asylum seekers fleeing persecution, who arrive without permission in Australia, have actually committed some offence under law for which they are then detained. When in fact, under both international and Australian law, those fleeing persecution have the right to seek protection in Australia.

Furthermore, as a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Australia agrees to facilitate the process of seeking protection in a humane way.

Justification for mandatory detention is given by the government, directly, as well as indirectly through calculated inferences connecting those fleeing brutal regimes to terrorism, as a security issue.

Most asylum seekers arrive without valid documents or visas in Australia because they unable to leave their countries using their own names for fear of their lives. They are encouraged by those assisting them in their escape to destroy their documents before or on arrival in Australia so that they can not be sent back to face persecution.

Asylum seekers continue to be detained long after their identity has been established and security checks are completed, one also has to wonder what kind of security check a 1 year old child would require.

Of more than 13,000 asylum seekers who arrived in Australia in 2001 only 11 were rejected on “character grounds” and only one because of a suspected terrorist links.

The Minister for Immigration further supports this policy as a deterrent to other asylum seekers who may be so misguided as to believe that Australia is intent on adhering to its responsibilities under the Refugee Convention.

Psychological abuse

Mandatory detention is punitive and its implementation in Australia, with a complete lack of independent monitoring and enforceable guidelines, has meant that many asylum seekers are living in conditions and subjected to treatment amounting to serious psychological abuse.

Over the past eight months I have been in contact with asylum seekers in Villawood detention centre as well as the remote Port Hedland and Curtin detention centres.

In working for the release of children and individuals I have learnt of the very human cost of Australia’s policy.

One family I have been in regular contact with, and about whom I have become increasingly concerned, has remained in Curtin detention centre since their arrival in November 1999 after fleeing persecution and torture in Iran.

Curtin in WA, like Woomerra, is an isolated camp surrounded by desert. Recently a priest was permitted to visit Curtin after long negotiations with the DIMA Management. The family said it was the only visit they had ever received.

The father of the family, whose children are now aged 13 and 17, has spoken to me of the unimaginably bleak country that they have been living in for the last two and a half years.

They arrived on Christmas Island with a belief that they were finally safe, that Australia would protect them and that they were free from fear.

Numbers not names

When they were taken to Curtin, the children – then aged 11 and 14 – became frightened and confused. They did not understand why they had been taken to a prison. Their possessions were confiscated and they were forced to wear the same clothes for two months.

They have been separated from each other into different rooms for long periods of time. They are called by numbers, not by names, and are not allowed to see the nurse unless they show an ID card with their photo and number on it.

Soon after they arrived, the children witnessed a desperation which they had never seen, which they did not understand and which woke them with panic for many months.

They witnessed people collapsing and being taken away during a hunger strike. The father told me that his children had believed the people where dying and that they too would die if they stayed in Curtin.

The 11 year old girl witnessed a friend slashing his body with a razor, she cried hysterically and believed that the officers taking him away were taking him to prison. He was taken to an isolation cell, which is used both as a punishment and in place of medical treatment for severely depressed detainees. There are reports of asylum seekers being held in isolation cells for long periods of time after suicide attempts.

One can only imagine the compounding effect this would have on someone suffering depression or traumatic stress, particularly someone who had previous experience of imprisonment, torture and interrogation in a similarly confined space.

The children also witnessed hangings during and after the hunger strike. The father and other asylum seekers report that these are a regular occurrence in the camp. The children were not seen by a counselor or other mental health worker after the trauma of that experience. Nor have they had access to education for most of the time they have been detained.

After 18 months – during which the mother and children developed anxiety and depression, and the father became increasingly overwhelmed by his powerlessness to help them – the boy sewed his lips together, and the children entered a hunger strike which lasted 25 days and from which they have not yet recovered.

“Are we animals?”

The girl passed out several times and was unable to walk. She asked ”Are we animals that they should feed us in a cage? I don’t want this food – I want my freedom.”

After they had been on hunger strike for 22 days, officers in riot gear carried the father and son away in the middle of the night and put them in an isolation cell. The mother and daughter cried till morning.

By the end of the hunger strike the girl had lost 11 kilos and the boy 13. The children were punished for their desperation by being refused permission to attend the few activity sessions available for children in Curtin.

They have both withdrawn and spend their time alone. The boy is awake all night and sleeps during the day, his hands shake constantly. Both the children have regular nightmares and thoughts of death. The mother has asked to be placed in isolation, as she can not cope, she rarely eats and is unhealthily thin.

The story of this family is one common to all the families I have been in contact with. The combination of harsh conditions, the uncertainty of indefinite incarceration, mistreatment by custodial authorities and the effect of holding already traumatized people without adequate support services, is destroying lives.

The Department of Immigration displays a Detention Standards Agreement on its web site, giving guidelines for the treatment of and services to be administered to detainees. It gives the impression that detention centers have an enforceable set of requirements for the provision of services. The guidelines outline a system which complies with international standards and Australian State and territory laws, a system sensitive to the cultural, physical and emotional needs of detainees. Anyone in Woomerra and Curtin would tell you that they would appreciate it if they were just treated like human beings, if their children were not suffering psychological abuse, if education actually existed, if the food was digestible and they were not teargassed, water cannoned and intimidated by staff.

Despite the impression of accountability given by the government, the treatment of asylum seekers in detention is not governed by or subject to any legally enforceable regulations. Under the current law, the potential exists for ACM to grant or deny the right of any detainee to any service or facility except the right to legal process.

Under this system, a scenario where all detainees are placed in individual isolation cells for six months, denied contact with other detainees and fed only rice every day is possible because nothing binds them to standards in the way that other incarceration facilities in Australia are bound by regulation.

Illogical

Despite any possible future improvements in conditions in detention centers, mandatory detention remains an inhumane and illogical policy.

Australia is the only Western country that mandatorily detains asylum seekers whilst their claims are being heard. Various viable alternatives have been researched by different organizations, and successful models from different countries have been available for many years.

To keep that one family in Curtin detention centre is costing Australia about $3,600 dollars a week. A select Parliament committee has costed alternatives, including home detention and transitional housing. Using their figures the weekly cost for that family would be $150 on Parole and $110.32 on probation.

Many asylum seekers are professionals who have much to offer this country. The loss of their contribution while they are incarcerated makes this policy not only incredibly cruel but incomprehensibly stupid.

In detention centres across Australia there are doctors, scientists, university professors, teachers and skilled tradesmen. The absurdity of the incarceration of such people, when hundreds of medical positions remain unfilled in country towns, where doctors are desperately needed, where many schools are understaffed, and when skilled tradesmen along with increased population would solve many of the problems experienced in small communities, is unjustifiable.

Asylum seekers are living in a country which can not be justified. I cannot live in a country in which my freedoms are not shared by all, or let my daughter to grow up in a country where the abuse of children is sanctioned.

One of the many problems facing those working to end this policy, is its overwhelming public support – the support of a people who seem unable or unwilling to extend their imagination to ask the basic question “What if this was happening to me?”

As John Donne said in his famous verse;

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

Naleya Everson
Refugee Action Committee Forum,
Canberra, 10 April 2002