11 years too long: End offshore detention after more than a decade of cruelty

Today marks 11 long years of Australia’s cruel, inhumane offshore detention regime.

The policy has caused, and continues to cause, irreparable harm to thousands of people seeking safety and it must be stopped.

On 19 July 2013, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced, “as of today, asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia”.

Thousands of people were then sent to detention camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, where successive Australian governments oversaw a score of human rights abuses, including extreme levels of violence and trauma, sexual assault, lack of medical treatment, family separation, and the deaths of at least 14 people.

Refugee and ASC community member Rahim* is a survivor of this brutal regime, having spent more than six years detained on Nauru.

“It is hard to explain those six and a half years and all of the torture, troubles, issues and pain,” he says.

While Rahim is now living in New Zealand, the brutality of offshore detention still weighs heavily on him every day.

“For me, I’m still basically in Nauru because of all the trauma, problems, and issues that persist.”

“Sometimes because of many years of being traumatised, it’s hard for me to read and concentrate,” he explains.

Australia’s offshore detention regime has been widely and globally condemned, most recently with Human Rights Watch’s annual report denouncing the policy as tarnishing Australia’s human rights record and at odds with the country’s commitment to the Refugee Convention.

As Rahim says, “Australia is a country with human rights but I can give you my evidence and records that they do not exist for those who spend many years in offshore detention”.

Yet the regime still persists today. More than 90 people remain detained on Nauru and operations continue to be funded, with the Albanese government committing a mammoth $604 million for offshore processing on Nauru in the recent Federal Budget.

At the same time, the humanitarian crisis for dozens of refugees trapped in Papua New Guinea (PNG) continues, with the Australian government committing new funding to its deal with the PNG government to hold refugees that sought asylum more than a decade ago.

More than a decade on, it is time for the Albanese government to end offshore detention for good and ensure the humane treatment and fair processing of people seeking asylum.

We must end this shameful chapter of Australian history once and for all.