Behrouz Boochani's visit to the Australian Federal Parliament came on the same day the Labour government re-authorised Nauru as an offshore processing country. Photo / Supplied
Behrouz Boochani's visit to the Australian Federal Parliament came on the same day the Labour government re-authorised Nauru as an offshore processing country. Photo / Supplied
Kurdish Iranian journalist and former refugee Behrouz Boochani then promptly called for an end to Australia’s offshore immigration detention facilities for asylum seekers and refugees.
Boochani had been an inmate at the Manus Island facility for six years and famously wrote his first book describing the harrowing conditions the refugees faced. Ironically, the book - No Friend but the Mountains -won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, but he couldn’t attend the ceremony because he was still detained.
Later he was allowed to visit New Zealand where he sought asylum and residency was granted but he has continued to speak up on the issue, which has an important New Zealand connection and possible solution.
For JustSpeak executive director Aphiphany Forward-Taua, Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers is not in line with the United Nations conventions it is a signatory of.
“These detention centres are a stain on the reputation and mana of Ahitereiria,” she says.
And she saw the Prime Minister’s visit to Australia as an opportunity to speak on the issue.
“Ko tēnei tētehi kowhiringa mō te Pirimia Hipkins ki te tū tōtika tōna tuara i runga i tēnā atamira, ki te maumahara a Pirimia Albanese e pā ana ki tōna mea i haenatia rātou ki te UN anō hoki,” she says.
(This is an opportunity for Prime Minister Hipkins to take a strong stance on this stage, to remind Prime Minister Albanese to fulfil obligations to the conventions signed with the UN.)
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Australia started sending asylum seekers who arrived on its shores by boat (or were intercepted en route) to its offshore immigration detention facilities in Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea in 2001. The practice stopped briefly in 2008 before being resumed in 2012. The detention policy also applies to children, whether accompanied by adults or travelling alone.
New Zealand’s offer
Since 2013, Australia’s policy has been that anyone who has been detained in these centres can never be settled in Australia, even if they are granted refugee status. The only way out is for a third country to offer them resettlement.
In 2012, New Zealand first made an offer to resettle 150 refugees a year from Australia’s detention centres.
Successive governments in Australia did not take up the offer. It was only in March last year that a deal was signed between the two countries that would allow 150 refugees a year for the next three years a pathway to resettlement in New Zealand.
Australia’s prolonged detention of those seeking asylum and their treatment in these centres have been widely criticised at home and overseas.
The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor in 2020 called it “cruel, inhuman or degrading”, and a UN committee (OPCAT) report last year said it breached international law.
The response at home
Refugee Council of Australia chief executive Paul Power says people subjected to Australia’s offshore processing policy have been held by or on behalf of Australia “against their will for over nine years”.
“A majority were later found to be in need of refugee protection,” Power says.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins meets with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Photo / RNZ
The Australian Greens introduced a bill on Monday - the first sitting day of the parliament for the year - to evacuate all refugees from offshore detention in Nauru and PNG, and to support them in Australia until a durable third-country settlement is reached.
The bill found a vocal supporter in Boochani, who is now based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
From detainee to visitor
In 2019, the then Australian home affairs minister Peter Dutton said Boochani, whose book was written secretly using his phone before it was published in Australia, would never be permitted to come to Australia.
Speaking to Teaomaori.news from his hotel room in Brisbane, Boochani pauses when asked how it feels to be in that country.
“Of course, in some ways it is enjoyable. And it is very surreal”, he says.
He is currently on a tour of Australia where he has been promoting his second book Freedom, Only Freedom.
He has visited many cities, he appeared in a session of ABC’s Q+A on Monday and on Tuesday, he visited the Australian Parliament for the first time to offer his support for the Greens’ tabled legislation.
“The whole system was designed to dehumanise people,” says Boochani.
“They dehumanise refugees, they dehumanise people who committed no crime, and people who just seek asylum.”
