After the final refugee was evacuated into the night last week, Australia’s contentious detention facility on Nauru is now empty.
There have been 4,183 persons detained there since 2012, pausing Australia’s processing of asylum seekers in the small Pacific nation for more than ten years.
The Nauru centre is a sore spot on Australia’s human rights record since it has been called a site of “indefinite despair” and “sustained abuse” by observers from Doctors Without Borders and Human Rights Watch.
Its importance in defending the country’s borders and “breaking the business model” of people traffickers has been argued for by seven successive prime ministers.
The government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would spend enormous sums of money, including A$486 million (£255 million; $320 million) this year, to keep Nauru open as a deterrent even if the facility is uninhabited.
Maria has experienced being abruptly evacuated from Nauru. After being imprisoned on the island for more than a year, she was transported to Sydney in 2014 owing to a serious renal problem.
Maria, a Somalian who had survived female genital mutilation, fled civil strife and travelled to Australia over the course of several weeks by plane and boat.
Maria, who doesn’t want to disclose her last name, explains, “That devastated me because we had lots of neighbours and cousins who have died in the Mediterranean.
Maria tells the BBC that her time at sea felt like it would never end. The vessel carried scores of people, but it was small—”like a kayak”—and had no bathroom. “I was so ill that I was having hallucinations. I couldn’t stop considering my brother. And how I resisted telling him anything false.
They were eventually rescued by the Australian Navy and transported to Nauru.
Maria has vivid, intense memories of the island. She describes walking on jagged stones in the sweltering heat with her feet sliced up and burned. She continues, “Green and black mould which grew on everything” covered her tent as a result of the dampness.
She picked up group movement and the need to ignore sexual advances from campers in public. According to Maria, “dehumanizing” behaviour, such as women being monitored in the shower or having sanitary pads rationed out, became the norm.
“The guards and the girls engaged in a lot of improper connections. Despite the fact that you are a refugee, they treated you like you were a prisoner.
Maria was imprisoned in Sydney upon her departure from Nauru before being eventually freed on a bridging visa. In Brisbane, where she currently resides with her Australian husband and two kids, she runs a business.
However, she must renew her visa every six months, and she constantly fears that she’ll be removed from her family and put back in jail. It is in limbo. I have no idea what will occur tomorrow.
Since offshore processing started in 2001, several refugees have recounted accounts of suffering similar to Maria’s.
John Howard, a conservative prime minister, introduced it. The policy was put on hold by Kevin Rudd’s Labor administration when he left office in 2007 before being reinstated in 2012, also under Labor, initially as a stopgap measure in response to an increase in boat crossings.
The policy has been defended by some politicians as essential to safeguarding Australia’s borders and saving mariners’ lives.
However, analysts contend that it accomplished nothing to reduce deaths or arrivals at sea. Both decreased beginning in 2014 when the government covertly switched to a policy known as “boat turnbacks,” which involves removing migrant boats from Australian waters and sending individuals on board back to their countries of origin.
After that pivot, there were no more fresh arrivals in the offshore detention facilities in Papua Fresh Guinea (PNG) on Manus Island and Nauru.
And since then, according to a 2021 analysis of offshore imprisonment by the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, “Australia has spent considerable effort and money trying to extract itself from its arrangements in Nauru and PNG.”
Australia evacuated residents from the islands as a result of escalating health problems and suicidal behaviour among young inmates, as required by a unique legislative structure.
As a result, everyone has been removed from Nauru, yet, according to the Human Rights Law Centre, 80 former government detainees are still “trapped” there.
Every expert UN panel tasked with examining offshore processing over the past ten years has voiced objections to the practice. Inmates have committed suicide in nearly half of the fourteen fatalities.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) declared Australia’s actions to be illegal and degrading in 2020 but concluded that no charges should be brought against the country.
Despite subtly moving away from offshore processing, Australia has agreed to pay a US jail company A$422 million to manage Nauru through at least 2025.
“The enduring capability ensures that regional processing arrangements remain ready to receive and process any new unauthorised maritime arrivals, future-proofing Australia’s response to maritime people smuggling,” a Department of Home Affairs spokeswoman said.
Regarding the last prisoner departing Nauru, Mr Albanese has not made any remarks. “Tough on borders, not weak on humanity” is how his government has framed its approach to refugee seekers.
Offshore processing will continue to be an expensive, bicameral strategy, according to critics, as long as “refugees are being used to try and win votes.”
According to Jana Favero, director of advocacy at the Asylum Seeker Resource Center, “People seeking asylum by sea have been weaponized and politicized over decades in Australia.”
However, Ms. Favero and other detractors think that attitudes toward “deterrence-based” border control are changing. She applauds the final exodus from Nauru, calling it a “long overdue move for refugees” that resulted from “tireless advocacy.”
“What we saw at the last election was a rejection of fear-based politics,” she asserts.
According to polling, sentiments regarding immigration have changed. According to the Lowy Institute think tank, in 2017, when asked if refugees in Nauru and PNG should be let to settle in Australia, 45% agreed and 48% disagreed. This year, a 15-point increase over 2018 in the percentage of respondents who said “openness to people from all over the world is essential to who we are as a nation” was revealed in the poll.
“It has already been ten years… I feel like I’m acclimated to it at this point,” she says.
I try to live my life to the fullest, but there are still days when I feel overwhelmed and wonder, “Why me?”
