Beyond the Park Hotel: Australia?s immigration detention network

He saw people sink into depression, waiting for the freedom they feared would never come.Eventually, in mid-2021, Mustafa and his father were brought to Australia because his father needed medical treatment, but more than 200 refugees and asylum seekers still live on Nauru and in PNG.One Afghan father, whose name has been hidden for the safety of his family, has been recognised as a refugee and is desperate to help his family, but he is stranded in the PNG capital, Port Moresby, without the right to work.He travelled to Australia in 2013 and “after three days the Australia immigration transferred [him] by force to Manus Island”.He was held in a detention camp that was as widely condemned as the one on Nauru.In 2017, the camp was found to be illegal and closed, and its detainees moved to accommodation in the local community.Two years later, the Afghan refugee says he was taken to Port Moresby, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Single people also get just over 100 Australian dollars in cash each week, and about the equivalent in basic supplies so they can cook for themselves.Meanwhile, almost 60 maritime refugees are being held in detention centres across mainland Australia after being moved there from Nauru or PNG, mostly for medical reasons.Their imprisonment, like that of the refugees on Nauru and PNG, has been repeatedly condemned by human rights groups both within Australia and internationally.Detaining people for nine years simply for trying to get to the country by boat is illegal, says lawyer Daniel Taylor, who represents a number of refugees in Australian immigration detention alongside his colleague Noeline Balasanthiran Harendran.“Under international law, it’s arbitrary imprisonment,” Taylor said.“International law requires a proportionality and a reason for detention,” he adds, such as the need to determine refugee status, or consider any security issues.But these men are recognised refugees, and because most have been held for almost nine years and many of them were brought to Australia by the Australian government, there is no security risk, he added.Detaining a recognised refugee is also illegal, Harendran says, noting that under the 1951 Refugee Convention “a refugee… needs to be granted freedom of movement as part of them being accepted as a refugee.”Keeping the refugees in indefinite detention has also proved “extraordinarily expensive”, according to Australia’s Refugee Council.For the 2019-2020 financial year, the cost of onshore immigration detention was 361,835 Australian dollars ($266,519) per person.