Close Nauru and Manus Detention Centers

Australia is the only country that imposes indefinite mandatory detention on refugees. Detention centers in remote places around Australia are seen as “factories for mental illnesses”. These centers are very expensive to run and extremely isolated. The remote centers are notoriously unattractive to trained staff, impractical for supplying goods.

The Manus Island facility is one of two in Australia’s offshore immigration processing regime. Both it and the one on the Pacific Island nation of Nauru, have been hugely controversial and highly criticized by the international community and human rights organizations. The Australian government provides funding and aid to the governments of PNG and Nauru to operate the centers, which house refugees and asylum seekers who arrived in Australia, or surrounding waters, by boat.

Australia's detention centers in Nauru and Manus Island may have originally been intended to hold detainees for a short period – say, six months – while they were investigated and their claims to refugee status were assessed. But that has long since ceased to justify the existence of these centers.

Papua New Guinea has already said it will close the Manus Island detention center after the country’s Supreme Court found it was illegal, yet nothing has been done so far. The conditions are so terrible, so inhumane that the medical problems are for most, psychiatric. The conditions there are bleak, the tropical heat extreme, air conditioning is rare, the guards and surrounding locals are hostile, and detainees are regularly physically and verbally abused.

Detaining refugees and their children in cruel offshore camps or in harsh centers in Australia is expensive and deeply harmful. Long-term detention causes mental ill-health and wastes the lives of people who are fleeing persecution. Australia’s notorious practice of indefinite mandatory detention is causing serious damage to vulnerable people who have already suffered trauma and persecution.

Close down offshore detention on Manus Island and Nauru and allow refugees to live in the community and receive full work rights so they can support themselves where possible.

Sign this petition and ask Malcolm Turnbull, the Prime Minister of Australia to shut down the Nauru and Manus detention centers once and for all.