Australian immigration detention facilities

[2][3] The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has cited these centres as a "damning indictment of a policy meant to avoid Australia's international obligations".

[5] Towards the end of the 1990s, a large increase in the number of unauthorised arrivals exceeded the capacity of the existing Immigration Reception and Processing Centres (IRPCs) at Port Hedland and Curtin.

Under Article 31 of the convention, the Australian government is legally obligated to grant anyone fleeing persecution and seeking asylum the right to enter the country by whatever means possible.

[citation needed] Nauru Regional Processing Centre was operated by Broadspectrum and Wilson Security, and then later by Canstruct International (with a $591 million contract) and finally by a Nauruan Government Commercial Entity.

[citation needed] The 3 new immigration detention facilities in Lorengau on Manus Island have security and some services provided by Paladin Group under a contract worth more than $423 million.

[25] On 5 May 2014, it was reported that several Salvation Army staffers had alleged that refugees were regularly subjected to beatings, racial slurs, and sexual assaults within the facility.

[26] In March 2002, Irene Khan, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, said: It is obvious that the prolonged periods of detention, characterised by frustration and insecurity, are doing further damage to individuals who have fled grave human rights abuses.

[27]In 2016 the Australian government announced an intention to exchange some proven refugees from either Nauru and/or Manus Island for certain displaced people presently in Central America as part of an agreement with the Obama administration of the United States.

However, latest information appears to cast doubt on the willingness of the US government to honour any such agreement, especially in light of Trump's executive order suspending entry to the US from several countries.

[30] On 4 February 2019 the remaining 4 children who had been detained on Nauru were sent to the U.S.[31] In May 2019, it was revealed that some of the U.S. detainees sent to Australia in the "swap", were Rwandan men, former members of the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda, who had been accused of mass-murdering tourists in 1999.

Governments initially refused to comment on the matter, but later Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that the men had been assessed by security agencies.

By 4 June there had been at least 26 attempts at suicide or self-harm by men in the Lorengau camps and Port Moresby (in the hospital and accommodation for sick asylum seekers).