Australians call for closure of overseas refugee detention centers

Thousands of protesters across Australia have held demonstrations, calling for the immediate closure of the country’s overseas refugee detention centers.

Demonstrators, carrying banners reading, “Close the camps! Bring them here!”, filled the streets of several major cities, including Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Newcastle, Hobart, Brisbane, Adelaide and Ballina, on Saturday to demand asylum seekers from notorious refugee camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG) islands be resettled on the mainland.

“The point was to keep the pressure up on the [Prime Minister Malcolm] Turnbull government after the election. We think refugee policy is coming apart at the seams,” said Chris Breen, a spokesman for the Refugee Action Collective and organizer of the Melbourne rally.

“The abuse isn’t a product of lack of oversight, it’s built into the detention system,” he added.

According to Australian law, anyone who is intercepted while attempting to reach the mainland by boat is sent to detention camps on Manus Island off Papua New Guinea or the Pacific island of Nauru to process their requests. The camps, however, according to rights groups, are just limbos, in which refugees spend some years in predicament, facing severe misconduct and sexual assault.

On August 24, the Guardian published an 8,000-page report, known as the Nauru files, said to be leaked from Australian-run Nauru camp, detailing over 2,000 cases of sexual abuse and mistreatment against refugee children and women in the camp between May 2013 and October 2015.

On August 2, a joint report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch showed that about 1,200 men, women and children, who have been held on Nauru suffered “severe abuse, inhumane treatment, and neglect.”

The refugees and asylum seekers “endure unnecessary delays and at times denial of medical care, even for life-threatening conditions. Many have dire mental health problems and suffer overwhelming despair—self-harm and suicide attempts are frequent. All face prolonged uncertainty about their future,” it said, adding that they also faced frequent unpunished assaults, including physical and sexual, by locals in Nauru.

The report went on to say that “failure to address serious abuses appears to be a deliberate policy to deter further asylum-seekers from arriving in the country by boat.”

A few days ago, Australia and Papua New Guinea agreed to close the infamous camp on Manus Island, weeks after a court ruled that holding refugees in the facility was illegal.

The camp holds about 850 asylum seekers who sought to reach Australia by boat. It is funded by the Australian government.

The Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea also ruled in late April that detention of asylum seekers in the camp was in violation of the right to personal liberty enshrined in the country’s constitution.

A medical report by the Australian Human Rights Commission has already said 95 percent of children held in detention centers showed risks of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Canberra, however, insists that these people have two choices: either settle in the Pacific islands or return to their home countries, even if they are found to be refugees, arguing that such policy of exiling refugees to remote islands has saved lives by removing the motivation for asylum seekers to attempt the perilous and often deadly ocean crossing from Indonesia to Australia in rickety boats.

Earlier in the week, the Manus Island detention center was in the spotlight after media published graphic images of two bloodied Afghan men who had allegedly been attacked with an iron bar by locals.

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