The unstated and unconscionable rationale behind Ireland's cruel direct provision system is to make conditions for asylum seekers so uncomfortable that they will think twice before coming here. That logic is being employed, it would appear, on a scale scarcely dreamed of here by Australia in its "offshore processing" of asylum seekers in the Australian-funded remote island camp of Nauru off Papua New Guinea.
A system of arbitrary and aparently indefinite detention of asylum seekers who have committed no crime. is used by the government on Nauru and the PNG island of Manus (842 prisoners), although three quarters of those assessed are found to be refugees with well-founded fear of persecution and so entitled to protection under the 1951 UN convention. Australia’s so-called “Pacific solution” - out of sight, though increasingly not out of mind.
Last week Guardian Australia published details of a trove of leaked official reports of over 2,000 incidents reported on Nauru over two years, including sexual abuse, assault and attempted self-harm, more than half involving children. Although the government and the subcontractors employed by it to run the camp which contains 442 people have assured a series of official inquiries that they are improving conditions, the paper says the leaks show a pattern of persistent complacency and underreporting of incidents on the island, access to which is tightly controlled.
The recurring themes in the released forms, all compiled by officials and gusrds, are the repeated, clearly despairing threats to take their own lives by people at the end of their tether.
Nauru is the world’s smallest independent island state – population 10,000. Once rich on phosphate deposits it is now broke, overwhelmingly reliant on foreign aid, and all too eager to accept payments from Australia to house its asylum seekers/refugees. But it is now time for the latter, a wealthy country, to recognise its legal and moral obligations to those fleeing across the Pacific from oppression, time to bring them to, and settle them in safety on the mainland. Time to close the hellish camps of Nauru and Manus.