Four articles recently published in the Journal of Medical Ethics / British Medical Journal have characterised Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers in offshore detention as involving or amounting to torture.
For those of us who have been involved in the area for some time, this does not come as a surprise: the frequency of self-harm, attempted suicide and successful suicide give a fair pointer to what is going on. And the Australian government makes it very difficult for ordinary Australians to find out what is going on in these places. In fact, the Australian government has made it a criminal offence for anyone who works in the detention system to disclose anything they learn in that capacity.
But some health workers in the offshore detention system have remained true to their ethical obligations: they are exposing the facts, even at the risk of prosecution. [That risk is very low: the government knows tht, if it prosecutes any health worker in the detention system for disclosing the truth about what is going on, that person will get the best pro bono defence this country has ever seen, and their defence will involve getting into the witness box and describing in detail the sort of horrors these articles disclose. See my analysis of how a defence would work]
Here are the four articles. We should be grateful that the authors had the courage and decency to publish the facts we all should know:
Torture, healthcare and Australian immigration detention by Ryan Essex
The clinician and detention by Howard Goldenberg
The atrocities occurring in our detention centres continue to define us as a nation. What has happened to us that we can allow mistreatment of innocent human beings who have been caught up in political failure to continue unabated in our name? We are allowing torture, rapes, child abuse, sickness, mental illness, deaths and even murder to continue while our political parties fail to deliver transparency and most importantly fail to give any vestige of hope for resolution. Even self harm and suicides, with the extreme cry for help that of self immolation,has not managed to get the ostriches heads out of the sand. We should all be marching in the streets demanding freedom for the people who are referred to as inmates as though they are criminals. Instead we have left it to international instrumentalities to bring attention to the situation and call for action.
No one will be able to say I the future “we didn’t know”. We do know.