The cruelty and indifference of Serco and Border Force continue to astound.
Mojgan Shamsalipoor was in year 12 at school in Brisbane and was taken into detention. Then she was put in detention at BITA, the detention centre in Brisbane. Then she gave an interview to the ABC, and she was moved to detention at Wickham Point in Darwin, despite the fact that her husband (Milad Jafari, a permanent resident) lives in Brisbane.
Her removal from detention in Brisbane was brutal. She was dragged out in the middle of the night by the hair. Five or six Serco guards were invovled in the exercise: to remove a young woman from detention in one place and move her to Darwin, 3000 kilometers from her husband and friends. In the detention trade, this is known as “an extraction”. Here is an account of Mojgan’s “extraction”
She was put in detention in Darwin. A lawyer in Darwin agreed to try and help her. Then the next bit of wilful bastardry happened.
Here is his request to visit Mojgan:
“…Please find attached a legal visit request for Mojgan Shamsalipoor on Wednesday 12 August at 2pm.
I confirm that I have been engaged to represent this client, and [name deleted] who will be accompanying me is an intern at our firm….”
Here is their response:
“Good afternoon,
Can you please provide evidence you represent Mojgan Shamsalipoor?”
Mojgan’s solicitor replied:
“As you are aware, Ms Shamsalipoor has recently been transferred to WPIDC. We were instructed to represent her only yesterday, and will not be able to have an authority signed by her (e.g. by way of a form 956) until and unless we meet with her. If Serco or ABF is able to facilitate the signing of a form 956 prior to our visit, we would be happy to submit a form signed by us. Would this suffice?”
Serco, the company which runs detention centres, refused the solicitor’s request to visit:
“Unfortunately, your visit request has been refused due to not providing the 956 form signed by the detainee/ written authority of representation signed.”
Understand this: Serco told a solicitor he was not permitted to visit a young woman who has committed no offence but who is being held in detention a thousand kilometers away from home and husband.
And it raises the question: how is the solicitor to get a form signed by his client when he is not allowed to visit her?
No doubt Serco is just following instructions.
No doubt the instructions are given by the Border Force, whose uniforms (eerily reminiscent of SS uniforms) give some idea of their sense of arrogance and impunity.
I neither know nor care whether Mojgan has a good claim for protection as a refugee. She is a human being who has not committed any offence and who has bee treated with heartless contempt by Serco and border Force.
Every Australian should be ashamed of the way we treat innocent human beings.
And if you are interested in the way Serco sees itself, here is its website: http://www.serco-ap.com.au/ It boasts of its corporate responsibility. Perhaps it can take corporate responsibility for brutalising a frightened young woman. Or perhaps it was just “following orders”.
It boasts of its immigration services “Providing high quality services to people in our care”. I don’t think Mojgan would agree.
If you are appalled by Serco’s behaviour, let them know. Here are their contact details:
Serco Asia Pacific (Sydney)
Level 23, 60 Margaret Street, Sydney
New South Wales 2000
t. +61 (0)2 9964 9733
f. +61 (0)2 9964 9924
e. information@serco-ap.com.au
If you want to break someone’s resolve you break their spirit. There is no part of me that accepts the current situation. Something wicked this way comes.
This Govt continues to stoop to new lows – flouting the common conventions of a person’s right to be represented in legal matters! Abbott, Morrison, and Dutton MUST be made to answer for their iniquitous treatment of fellow human beings in the International Court! The sooner a case can be brought against them, the better. This might deter Labor from following in their footsteps! Perhaps we should mount a crowdfunding campaign to bring these villains to justice!
This is not the country I believed could perpetrate this monstrosity. Those evil men who have done this, those evil men who ordered it done must face justice. This is anti-human, anti-justice and anti-God. May God forgive you for your abominable actions.
Very clever Border Force. Catch 22 hey? Certainly not in the spirit of the law. You diminish our society and our culture with this act of bastardry. A vast amount of resources have been wasted to torture this young girl and her family.
A hard line approach on innocent people is the actions of a bully not a sign of strength.
Seems they’ve been reading Joseph Heller
Doesn’t her situation qualify her for a woman at risk visa?
Or are these never actually granted..
Unbelievable how she is being treated, no matter her story really.
Mojgan needed to flee by boat, as there was no UNHRC available to her in her dreadful situation. There are some 204 visas being issued but the families I have meet on these visas have waited up to 20 years with abuses happening regularly in refugee camps. We shall keep fighting for those who have been forced to flee.
Why are people not understanding, we are behaving like the Third Reich.
These refugees are being treated so poorly.
Australia is better than this.
We have learnt nothing from history!
Australia is NOT better than this. It has never been better than this. Ask a First Nations person…
Besides the sanitising effect of publicity (maybe SMH,7:30 Report, raising in Parliament), surely an appeal to the Commonwealth Ombudsman or the Federal Court would be possible for such an appalling abuse of human rights.
What is this government really up to? Are they deviously training an army of thugs, desensitising them by creating cruel and intolerant laws and regulations to be used against LEGAL asylum seekers and other powerless people, encouraging them to become mindlessly cruel, so they will not question the orders to subdue us when Abbott & Co trashes the Constitution to tighten their grip on power before we are able to vote them out? Why else do they slide lower and lower down the scale of humanity? Each day, Australia resembles a little more, a re-run of 1930’s Germany.
Like our police, these pathetic excuses for Australians are trying to look tough& brave but as usual failing miserably and instead look and behave like Nazis?
Sadly there is no other way to describe Border Force.They have no connection to real Australians but are the product of our insecure,spoilt LNP government that believes we respect them when in reality we despise them and their disgusting little boys bullying behavior!
This girl shud b with her husband and living a free life here in Australia! She would be entitled to legal representation, IF this was a Democracy!
This is the country my father came to as an internee during WW2. He stayed here and brought up his family because it was a free place with opportunities for all. I’m pleased he is dead now because he would be ashamed and terrified by the rise of the nazi like behaviour of our politians. I am appalled by the callous and inhumane treatment of people seeking safety and freedom as I have enjoyed. Do they not realise that they are fostering intolerance and hatred for this country by these actions?
I made the mistake of filling in as “counsellor” at Maribyrnong in 2000 to relieve a jaded social worker. The attitude of guards then was the same. All technical points to frustrate the asylum seekers held there. When I argued for suicide watch for an asylum seeker the OIC was concerned about the extra cost involved more than the person. I spend every day wondering if I should stay for the asylum seekers, or walk out to not be complicit in the pretense that I had any influence at all. The Immigration Officer was not interested in anything I relayed. I was told that conveying the message that the lights were out in the toilet was not my job. I have never gotten over the mere three weeks I spent there.
The tragedy of it all is immeasureable.
I don’t subscribe to an open-door policy. We obviously have to vet any arrivals, under any circumstances, and do the mandatory checks on health and security risks, for the arrivals’ benefit (health) and for Australia’s benefit also.
While we treat them worse than animals all we are doing is exposing all of them to mental illness and tipping those who may be predispoded to lives of crime and possible pro-terrorist, anti-Australia behaviour by virtue of a learned resentment from the mistreatment received at the hands of the detention centre staffers.
I’d like to know the breakdown of the citizenship/nationality of the detention centre staff.
During my 10 weeks on Nauru I heard lots of accents other than Australian, most of them working in the security industry. I also gave a lift to a school teacher with a North American accent and learnt that she was Canadian. I asked her how she scored a job on Nauru and she said she had a working visa for Australia, saw an ad on the internet, applied and was accepted.
So, the treatment of the asylum seekers, for better or worse, and the potential negative consequences, are at the hands of other than Australians.
The whole situation is weird beyond belief.
By not equally exposing the inhumane, racist & misogynist treatment of non-citizens by Qatar, Syria and Saudi Arabia, you are saying that we white, liberal, anglo-celtics are somehow morally superior. I disagree!
People are people, and the extant inhumane treatment of non-citizens, homosexuals, non-moslems & women, by Islamic Middle East Governments and their agents, is worst and needs to be condemned by you and Australia at the U.N.