Australia's immigration laws are meant to be discouraging. Those who attempt to enter the country by boat without proper paperwork – asylum-seekers, almost invariably – are intercepted and transferred to remote offshore detention centres where harsh conditions are the norm.
Even if they are eventually granted refugee status, after an indefinite period of imprisonment, these desperate men, women and children will never be allowed into Australia – an inhumane policy the Australian government considers effective in deterring unwanted migrants.
The get-tough approach plays well in the more xenophobic reaches of domestic politics. But as a recent leak of incident reports from one of Australia's two offshore compounds has shown, this stern policy has – unsurprisingly – resulted in a dysfunctional detention system whose involuntary residents are subject to violence, abuse and mental breakdown.
The documents made public by The Guardian come from the Australian-funded detention centre on the tiny island of Nauru, a strip-mined speck of phosphate in the Pacific Ocean some 4,000 kilometres northeast of Sydney that holds 442 people in a supervised processing camp. "Processing" is a cold bureaucratic euphemism: Some 500 migrants have passed through the secretive detention camp but remain hopelessly stuck on the barren, impoverished island, since Australia has no plans for their resettlement.
These people have committed no crime, and yet according to reports and eyewitness testimony, they are routinely subjected to cruelty, abuse and trauma that would not be tolerated in the prison system of any civilized country. Australia's policy has been condemned by United Nations agencies and numerous medical, legal and civil-liberties organizations.
Australia conveniently distances itself from the awful regime it created, insisting that the ultimate responsibility now rests with offshore governments paid to make an Australian problem go away. Such feeble self-absolution just doesn't cut it. Australia needs to close its dead-end camps and come up with a refugee policy that is safe, hopeful and humane.