Australia's abused asylum seekers paid multi-millions

Wendy Zukerman, Asia-Pacific reporter

The Australian government has been forced to pay A$23 million (?14.7 million) since 2000 to asylum seekers as compensation for being unlawfully detained or for sustaining injuries in government-run detention centres.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, reports released by the Australian government under freedom-of-information legislation show that there have been 404 claims for compensation from people in detention centres since 2000, including 293 claims of unlawful detention and 111 claims of negligence.

Another report, released by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, shows that there are currently more than 4000 people in immigration detention.

Under Australian law, an asylum seeker - someone seeking international protection who has not yet been adjudged a refugee - is immediately placed in detention while their application for refugee status is processed.

"The majority of people that we represent have been injured psychologically through post-traumatic stress disorder or depression," says Elizabeth O'Shea, a social justice lawyer at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers in Melbourne, Australia. Whether these problems are a result of detention or from previous experiences, she says the government owes all detained asylum seekers a duty of care to avoid mental and physical injury that could reasonably be foreseen.

Unlawful detention claims arise when a person is given refugee status but is not freed, as a result of an administrative error, for example. A spokesman for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship says that unlawful detention actions often include other claims, such as allegations of personal injury.

A decade ago, an alliance of Australian doctors lobbied for improved conditions for asylum seekers, but little has changed since then. A key issue is delays in processing applications.

Statistics from July show that more than two-thirds of Australia's asylum seekers had then been in detention for six months or longer and more than a third had been detained for a year or more.

"The longer they are in detention, the more problems are likely to develop," says Kathy Eagar at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia. According to Eagar, asylum seekers' psychiatric problems arise from the ongoing uncertainty of their claims for refugee status and are often compounded by the traumatic experiences they have left behind.

A review in The Lancet on the mental health of refugee children, published earlier this year, confirmed that detention after migration can be psychologically more harmful than the adversity suffered before migration.

Several mental-health groups are now calling for increased access to psychiatric services for asylum seekers in Australia.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1a23d666/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A110C110Caustralias0Eabused0Easylum0Eseeke0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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