The Australian government is brazenly flouting international law - just to keep refugees away from Nauru’s shores, according to a new Amnesty International report informed by unprecedented access to the secretive island.
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Amnesty International said it had interviewed 62 refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru, and more than a dozen current or former contract workers who delivered services on behalf of the Australian government, to compile a report entitled: Island of Despair.
The dossier of evidence details allegations of recurrent self-harm and suicide attempts, children attacked by teachers and threatened with machetes by peers, inadequate healthcare and persecution akin to that which refugees had fled in their homeland.
Dr Anna Neistat, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research, stated that: “On Nauru, the Australian government runs an open-air prison designed to inflict as much suffering as necessary to stop some of the world’s most vulnerable people from trying to find safety in Australia”.
Furthermore, Amnesty International warned Australia’s polices had shifted the goalposts of what other countries considered to be acceptable treatment of refugees and had already “harmed global standards on refugee protection”.
Dr Peter Young, former mental health director at International Health and Medical Services told Amnesty International that in offshore processing environments, “everything became subservient to ‘stopping the boats’.”
The report concluded: “The government of Australia’s ‘processing’ of refugees and asylum-seekers on Nauru is a deliberate and systematic regime of neglect and cruelty, and amounts to torture under international law”.
This policy legitimising systematic abuse is not only a dead end for refugees – it is also a dead end for Australia. It has earned Australia unique infamy as a country that will do everything it can to ensure refugees don’t reach its shores and to punish people who dare to try.
Dr Neistat also said that the government’s defence that it is “saving lives at sea” was flawed: “People are still drowning, it only means people don’t drown near Australia’s shores and people do die in Nauru”.
The Amnesty report calls for the immediate end of offshore processing on Nauru and on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
The question remains whether this report will change anything. Will it merely be part of the cruel legacy of Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party, which re-established offshore detention in 2012 and declared in 2013 that refugees would never be allowed into Australia?
