Australia’s Curtin Detention Centre Criticized Again

Curtin Detention Centre, in a remote area of West Australia, is in the spotlight again after another human rights organization visits and says the centre needs to be shut down.

Amnesty International sent a delegation to inspect the detention centre last week as part of a tour of detention centres around Australia. The four-person delegation spent two days at the centre, meeting with around 860 men currently detained there. After the visit, Amnesty International declared that the centre should be closed immediately. Amnesty’s Refugee Coordinator, Graeme Thom, said that there was an “air of hopelessness” among the asylum seekers and that their mental health was “obviously being crushed” by spending up to three years waiting.

Curtin Immigration Detention Centre is in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The Centre was once described as the Australia’s “most primitive” immigration detention centre and was closed by the Howard Government in 2002 following a riot. The current Gillard Government reopened Curtin in 2010 to hold Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum seekers whose applications for refugee status had been rejected. Curtin was built to house between 1200 and 1500 people and there are currently 856 men being detained there. In 2011, 1433 asylum seekers were being held in Curtin, the largest group of detained asylum seekers in Australia. There have been consistent reports of riots, hunger strikes, self-harm, suicide and depression amongst asylum seekers detained there.

In 2011, Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner visited Curtin. Following her tour, she raised concerns about the conditions in the centre. She noted that more than three-quarters of Curtin detainees were held for longer than six months and a third had been detained more than a year. She argued that “this indefinite detention, particularly in a remote place, is very damaging to their mental health.” She said that asylum seekers spoke to the delegation “about sleeplessness, about feelings of wanting to suicide.” She also said that “there have been mass voluntary starvation, people have been burning themselves with cigarettes, cutting themselves with razors and they tell us things like we are dying from the inside out.”

The Human Rights Commissioner raised serious concerns about the mental health of asylum seekers detained in Curtin. According to the report, an Afghan man being held in Curtin said “we feel that we have lost everything here – our hope, our health, our memories, our names, our ability to help our families, our minds. We are more than half way to dead now. We are all dying here, from the inside out. We see others who have gone mad and think that we are going there too.”

Amnesty’s full findings report will be released immediately after the tour on February 16 and a more comprehensive report on detention centre conditions around Australia is due later this year.