Asylum rules impact Ramadan
SYDNEY: For hundreds of Muslim asylumseekers being held in Australian detention facilities, Ramadan this year has been extra difficult.
During the holy month, which began in Australia on May 17, Muslims abstain from food and drink during daylight hours. For years, members of the country’s Muslim community have prepared home-cooked meals to share with the detainees after sunset, but a recent change to federal rules has barred visitors from bringing unpackaged foods into the detention centres.
“Most of the people here are depressed,” said Sayed Akbar Jaffarie, 31, an Afghanistan-born asylum-seeker who arrived in Australia in 2008 and has been detained since 2013 at the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in Sydney.
The government insists the rules are necessary to maintain the detainees’ health and safety, but activists say the measures are dehumanising and are part of an attempt to keep the detainees further out of the public eye.
Mr Jaffarie is one of at least 40 Muslims inside Villawood, but there are hundreds more in similar facilities around the country and held in offshore sites. There are 1,389 asylum-seekers currently in detention in Australia. Many of the detainees are migrants fleeing wars in Syria and Afghanistan who made the perilous journey by sea from Southeast Asia.
In Villawood, the country’s largest detention centre, about a quarter of the detainees have had their visas cancelled on character grounds or after committing a crime. More than 100 others were detained after being picked up at sea.
The Ramadan fast is physically and emotionally taxing for asylum-seekers, whose isolation and distance from family and friends is felt more sharply during a month meant for family and reflection.
Australia’s Department of Home Affairs, which oversees the facilities and implemented the policy change, said on its website that the rules are intended “to provide all detainees with a safe and healthy environment in immigration detention”.
The policy, the department said, “reduces the risk associated with visitors bringing in food that could compromise the safety, security and good order of immigration facilities.”
Mr Jaffarie, the subject of an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation investigation, said the new policy was devastating.
Many of the fasting asylum-seekers, he said, now went without food or stashed away food for meals before sunrise and after sunset. Despite petitioning the facility’s officials, the meal service times, he said, had not been altered for Ramadan, and on occasion Muslims were even served pork.
Daniel Webb, a lawyer for the Human Rights Law Center, called the policy cruel and “deliberately degrading”.
“The Australian government’s mandatory and indefinite detention regime is inherently degrading,” he said. “Day after day, meal after meal, phone call after phone call, people are forced to endure the indignity of not being free.”