The limitations of monitoring immigration detention in Australia

Purpose – This paper studies the experiences of asylum seekers in Australia. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between mental wellbeing, living conditions, and Australia’s detention policies in light of human rights. Design/methodology/approach – Using grounded theory, data were collected via observations, semi-structured interviews, key-informant interviews, and document analysis. Participants included seven asylum seekers and three professionals working with them. Findings – In light of a human rights framework, this paper reports on the mental distress suffered by asylum seekers in detention, the environments of constraint in which they live, and aspects of detention centre policy that contribute to these environments. The findings highlight a discrepancy between asylum seekers’ experiences under immigration detention policy and Australia’s human rights obligations. Research limitations/implications – This research indicates human rights violations for asylum seekers in detention in Australia. This research project involved a small number of participants and recommends systemic review of the policy and practices that affect asylum seekers’ mental health including larger numbers of participants. Consideration is made of alternatives to detention as well as improving detention centre conditions. The World Health Organization’s Quality Rights Tool Kit might provide the basis for a framework to review Australia’s immigration detention system with particular focus on the poor mental wellbeing of asylum seekers in detention. Originality/value – This study links international human rights law and Australian immigration detention policies and practices with daily life experiences of suffering mental distress within environments of constraint and isolation. It identifies asylum seekers as a vulnerable population with respect to human rights and mental wellbeing. Of particular value is the inclusion of asylum seekers themselves in interviews.

The policy of mandatory detention in Australia (that is the legal requirement to detain all non-citizens without a valid visa) was introduced by the Keating (Labor) Government in 1992 in response to a wave of Indochinese boat arrivals. Under this policy it is a requirement that ‘unlawful non-citizens’ (a national from another country without a valid visa) in Australia's migration zone are detained unless they have been afforded temporary lawful status through the grant of a bridging visa while they make arrangements to depart or apply for an alternative visa. Most are usually granted temporary lawful status in this manner, but if an unlawful non-citizen is considered to be a flight or security risk, or refuses to leave Australia voluntarily, they may be refused a bridging visa and detained in preparation for their removal. Currently, all asylum seekers who arrive without authority by boat are detained and usually transferred to Christmas Island while their reasons for being in Australia are identified. The main focus of Australia’s mandatory detention policy is to ensure that: • people who arrive without lawful authority do not enter the Australian community until they have satisfactorily completed health, character and security checks and been granted a visa, and • those who do not have authority to be in Australia are available for removal from the country. While Australia’s detention population is comprised of unauthorised boat arrivals (also referred to as irregular maritime arrivals), some visa overstayers and certain other unlawful non-citizens, it is the (often lengthy) mandatory detention of asylum seekers who have arrived unauthorised by boat that attracts the bulk of the attention in the public debate.

ABSTRACTAustralian parliaments and courts have recognised that aged care facilities with closed units can be places of (civil) detention where patients/consumers are deprived of their liberty. Current monitoring of these places of detention is substandard and inadequate, as evidenced by the multiple federal and state inquiries into South Australia’s Oakden Older Persons Mental Health Service. The monitoring of closed aged care facilities needs urgent strengthening via the use of rigorous, human-rights-based standards. The urgency to improve the system of monitoring for this form of civil detention coincides with Australia’s 2017 ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT). Australia’s commitment to OPCAT ushers in the establishment of National Preventive Mechanisms (NPMs) at the federal and state levels to strengthen monitoring of all places of detention in Australia. The Federal Government has indicated that Australia’s NPMs will initially focus on ‘primary’ places of detention. While closed aged care facilities are less traditional places of detention, this paper argues that the Federal Government, if it has learned anything from Oakden, should not delay strengthening its system of monitoring for these closed facilities.

In late 2023, the end of indefinite detention in Australia marked a significant shift in immigration policy towards a rights-based treatment of people seeking asylum. Whilst the High Court's ruling was welcomed internationally, the domestic response was divisive; debated within the political and media spheres. Given the role media coverage of refugees and asylum seekers plays in informing the public, this research explores how asylum seekers were portrayed in Australian news media following the court's decision. Employing thematic analysis, this study examined 183 articles, published between 8 November 2023 and 29 February 2024. The dominant Australian media narrative was one characterising asylum seekers as criminals deserving of punishment, which was largely aligned with media publication ownership. This research demonstrates how Australia's highly concentrated media landscape reinforces negative portrayals of refugees and asylums seekers and how news media can misinform the public and undermine the rights of asylum seekers.

This article considers the multitude of inquiries and investigations into the treatment of children in youth detention in Australia over the past five years (2017–2022) as well as examples of practices that constitute torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under international law (in particular, solitary confinement, use of restraints and force and strip searching). It explores how Australia might move beyond reacting to such treatment to preventing it because of the international and national monitoring and oversight mechanisms introduced by the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT).

Mobility and Displacement

The mobile phone enables people to be heard through walls of confinement. During the suspension of visits to immigration detention in the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile phones were a lifeline to family and friends. There is also a long history of people using phones to document and communicate their experience in Australian-run detention to the world. The Australian government’s attempts to ban mobile phones in detention provide a lens, and in this paper, a case study, to explore whether immigration detention in Australia is becoming more like prison. I argue that while the official purpose for detention remains administrative not punitive, the proposed mobile phone bans reveal the changing function of detention in Australian border control. Mobile phone bans show how people in influential roles have reimagined the legal subject of detention from the ‘asylum seeker’ to the ‘migrant criminal’. Proposals to ban mobile phones also convey a transformation in how immigration detention is legally conceived – from a civil space under the supervision of police and the general criminal law to a more segregated space ruled from within. Drawing on scholarship on law, crimmigration, and carcerality, this paper traces how mobile phone bans came to be regarded as the natural next step in detention law-making.

Reproductive Injustice at the Southern Border and Beyond: An Analysis of Current Events and Hope for the Future.

Mental health of children and adolescents in Australian alternate places of immigration detention.

This chapter explores the shifts in practices of onshore immigration detention in Australia. It argues that the mandatory detention of asylum seekers must be read alongside and in light of Australia’s bridging visa regime, and in particular the large number of asylum seekers released from detention and living in the community on discretionary and short-term bridging visas. Using crimmigration as a framework, this chapter argues that Australia’s bridging visa regime is not a practice ancillary to the primary policy of mandatory detention, but is central to the logic and policy of punishment and deterrence of onshore asylum seekers seeking protection within Australian territory. In analysing the bridging visa regime, the chapter focuses on the use of broad visa cancellation powers against asylum seekers on the basis of criminal behaviour and examines visa cancellation data from 2014 to 2016. Under the bridging visa cancellation powers, including under the Asylum Seeker Code of Behaviour, criminal law and immigration law operate interchangeably to surveil and control asylum seekers; it is not only asylum seekers’ status and mode of entry that is criminalised, but increasingly, criminal law and behavioural regulations are used to control, punish and deter bridging visa holders living in the community.

Free to read via publisher Previous research concerned with the experience of immigration detention focuses on the general immigration detention population, which mainly consists of men. This means that the experiences of men are treated as the norm, despite it being likely that women experience immigration detention differently. This study addresses this gap by focusing on the experiences of women detainees in long-term immigration detention in Australia. It examines the effects of long-term immigration detention on their mental health through a descriptive quantitative analysis and a qualitative inductive thematic analysis of data contained in publically available reports released by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and the Commonwealth Ombudsman. This study provides empirical detail describing how the experiences of women held in long-term immigration detention are similar and different to those of the general immigration detention population. We conclude by considering how these differences can be understood through a gendered understanding of risk.

Public health professionals have a responsibility to protect and promote the right to health amongst populations, especially vulnerable and disenfranchised groups, such as people seeking asylum and whose health care is frequently compromised. As at 31 March 2016, there was a total of 3707 people (including 384 children) in immigration detention facilities or community detention in Australia, with 431 of them detained for more than 2 years. The Public Health Association of Australia and the Australian Medical Association assert that people seeking asylum in Australia have a right to health in the same way as Australian citizens, and they denounce detention of such people in government facilities for prolonged and indeterminate periods of time. The position of these two professional organisations is consistent with the compelling body of evidence demonstrating the negative impact detention has on health. Yet in recent years, both the Labour and Liberal parties—when at the helm of Australia’s Federal Government—have implemented a suite of regressive policies toward individuals seeking asylum. This has involved enforced legal restrictions on dissenting voices of those working with these populations, including health professionals. This paper outlines Australia’s contemporary offshore immigration detention policy and practices. It summarises evidence on asylum seeker health in detention centres and describes the government’s practice of purposeful silencing of health professionals. The authors examine how Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers violates their health rights. Based on these analyses, the authors call for concrete action to translate the overwhelming body of evidence on the deleterious impacts of immigration detention into ethical policy and pragmatic interventions. To this end, they provide four recommendations for action.

While Australian legislation allows for the mandatory detention of asylum seekers arriving without a valid visa, in recent years the Australian Government has released thousands from immigration detention prior to their protection claims being finalised. This article outlines the results of interviews with eleven men who had been released into such community‐based arrangements after long periods of immigration detention. The major challenge for most of the men who had been granted the right to work upon their release was securing employment, while being denied the right to work was the major challenge for those released without this right. This article explores the social and personal benefits that employment can offer asylum seekers and refugees and the implications it has for integration into their host country.

The Australian government policy of mandatory immigration detention has been the subject of critique by human rights bodies and civil society. With many immigration detention facilities being located in remote sites, distance and expense means that few people get to observe detention practices in Australia directly. Through direct observations and through the voices of three men detained in the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre outside of the remote Western Australian town of Derby, the human costs of mandatory detention are presented and discussed. This is done through positioning this discussion as part of the process of bearing witness to mandatory detention in Australia.

The death of Hamid Kehazaei, an asylum seeker detained on Manus Island, has raised a number of questions surrounding the medical treatment he received and whether a move to mainland Australia, if expedited, could have saved him. He died of severe septicaemia from an infected cut, and the circumstances surrounding his death were largely unknown until medical documents were recently obtained by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) (Willacy, Solomons, and McDonald 2014). In these documents it was revealed that all treatment options on Manus Island had been exhausted, with recommendations for a transfer for further treatment made by International Health and Medical Services (IHMS), the medical provider on Manus. The initial request for a transfer to Port Moresby was made on August 25, 2014, which was subsequently delayed for more than twenty-four hours. He was then transferred to Brisbane on the afternoon of August 27 and pronounced dead on September 5. The ethical issues raised by this case are not isolated and are only part of long-term systemic failings that have compromised the health and well-being of those in immigration detention. According to the The Border Crossing Observatory (2015). there have been at least thirty-four deaths in immigration detention or community detention since 2000. At least eleven of these were suicides or suspected suicides. Hamid Kehazaei is one of three individuals who have died in offshore detention. These deaths have been set to a backdrop of epidemic levels of self-harm and poor physical and mental health. The immigration department itself acknowledged the link between prolonged immigration detention and deteriorating mental health at the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) hearings into children in detention (Marr and Laughland 2014). The devastating impact immigration detention has upon health and multiple deaths in custody have prompted numerous investigations. The Commonwealth Ombudsman’s (2013) report into suicide and self-harm in immigration detention was critical of how policies and practices were implemented. Specifically, and with particular resonance for the above case, the Ombudsman commented on the placement of asylum seekers within the detention network in relation to their health and wellbeing. At the time, these decisions were guided by the Detention Facility Client Placement Model. This model guided placement decisions for onshore detention; it is not clear how placement is determined in offshore locations.