The hotels with a no-checkout policy for some
Refugees brought to the mainland are languishing in long-term detention
These hotels are prisons. We spend 23 hours a day in our rooms and have one hour walking in the corridor. Ramsiyar Sabanayagam
When authorities brought Ramsiyar Sabanayagam to the Mantra Bell City Preston hotel in suburban Melbourne in November 2019, he assumed he would be there for only a few weeks.
Instead, Sabanayagam, a refugee from Sri Lanka, spent the next 14 months locked inside his room for all but a brief period each day, unsure when his ordeal would end.
He and the other refugees detained in the hotel were ordered to keep their windows shut until, after protesting, they were allowed to crack them open, but no more than 10cm. Guards checked on them day and night, sometimes shining flashlights into their faces while they slept. The men could see guests coming and going, and they knew that people were gathering with friends and loved ones in the dining hall below, but they had no hope of joining them.
“These hotels are prisons,” said Sabanayagam, a member of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority who fled violence in his homeland. “We spend 23 hours a day in our rooms and have one hour walking in the corridor, where there’s no sunshine, no fresh air.”
For Sabanayagam and scores of other asylum-seekers who have been held in Australian hotels, these stifling conditions have stretched on for months and months, pushing some to the breaking point. Two have tried to commit suicide.
All of the men had already been detained offshore for several years under Australia’s strict immigration laws before being transferred to the mainland for medical treatment. Even the island prisons, they said, were preferable, because at least they could go outside.
On Thursday, Australian authorities, facing increasing criticism, quietly began releasing dozens of the men, including Sabanayagam. Most seemed shellshocked by their sudden freedom in a country that for years gave them the distinct impression they were not welcome.
The terms of their release under temporary visas was unclear in many cases, leaving the men unsure whether they would be able to renew their visas when they expire and perhaps build lives in Australia.
“I’m happy, but it’s a little bit scary,” Emad Moradi, 38, a Kurdish refugee who left Iran in 2013 by boat, said after release.
The release of the men was one of the Australian government’s largest concessions to the country’s refugee rights movement in recent years. But more than a dozen of the 60 or so men originally detained in the Mantra hotel remain in custody, and some say they have received no news about their visa status or when they might be granted freedom.
At least 100 more, advocates for refugees say, are still in the Kangaroo Point Central Hotel and Apartments in Brisbane, while several others, including a family, are locked up in other motels and apartments or in permanent facilities.
Two of the detainees have tried to take their own lives, activists said. One of them, Thanush Selvarasa, 31, who arrived in Australia by boat in 2013 after fleeing Sri Lanka, said that after being deprived of normalcy for so many years, he had simply lost hope.
“It’s very hard to be in indefinite detention,” said Selvarasa, who was moved to a permanent facility after his suicide attempt and is still being detained. “My only dream is freedom.”
Under Australia’s hard-line immigration policy, the government denies settlement to anyone who arrives by boat, even legitimate asylum-seekers.
Such arrivals are relegated to offshore detention centres on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on Nauru, a remote outpost in the Pacific Ocean. Many are given no indication of their prospects, and despair has sparked a rash of suicides and selfharm among the detainees in recent years. The men being held in hotels — which the Australian government refers to as “alternative places of detention” — were granted permission under a now-repealed law to be transferred from the island prisons for medical treatment in mainland Australia.
Under the law, the men were promised that they would be taken to Melbourne or Brisbane for medical care and then returned to their offshore detention centre. But many said they had received little care, if any, after their transfer.
Sabanayagam, who has had shrapnel lodged in his body since he and his family were attacked in Sri Lanka, said the pain was sometimes so bad that he could not walk. He said he had informed doctors of this before leaving Manus Island, yet when he finally saw a doctor in Australia, accompanied by two security guards, all he was told was that he had shrapnel in his body.
Nick Martin, who from 2016 to 2017 was the chief medical officer on Nauru, responsible for determining which asylum-seekers needed medical care in Australia, said the government had been detaining the men in hotels to make an example of them.
“A lot of them have not received adequate medical treatment still, and the government is sending a message because it has gone hard on refugees and asylum-seekers,” Martin said. “Many will have severe mental health issues after being kept offshore for upward of eight years and then in these hotels.”
Critics of Australia’s offshore detention policy say that it is not only inhumane but ineffective as a deterrent.
“What stopped boats from arriving is not treatment of asylum-seekers in Australian lands, but the Australian Navy patrolling the waters off Indonesia, stopping ships carrying migrants,” said Francois Crpeau, a former UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants.
In an email yesterday, a spokesperson for the Australian Department of Home Affairs said the government’s policy was “clear that no one who attempts illegal maritime travel to Australia will be permanently settled here”.
“The individuals residing in the alternative places of detention were brought to Australia temporarily for medical treatment,” the spokesperson said. “They are encouraged to finalise their medical treatment so they can continue on their resettlement pathway to the United States, return to Nauru or PNG or return to their home country.”
Activists believe the decision to let them leave hotel detention was due to increased public and legal pressure on government and the hotels.