Fifty refugees who allege they endured horrific treatment in now-defunct South Australian detention centres are facing vast and unexplained delays to their cases against the government, which threaten to languish in the courts for more than a decade.
Documents filed in the 50 cases before the South Australian district court paint a disturbing picture about the treatment of detainees in the Port Hedland, Woomera and Baxter onshore detention centres in the early 2000s.
The documents allege detainees were beaten by guards with batons, subjected to frequent and unnecessary strip-searches, called by numbers rather than names, and placed in restraints and handcuffs to attend medical appointments.
Most of the 50 refugees allege they directly witnessed fellow detainees self-harming and attempting suicide. Many, including children, spoke of starving themselves in protest. Some sewed their lips together to do so.
In one case a former detainee of Baxter and Curtin detention centres alleges he was beaten by guards and said his children had to witness “men attempting to hang themselves from a tree”.
Another spoke of being beaten by guards while a bystander in a detention centre riot in mid-2000.
“The plaintiff was in the kitchen watching the riot when a guard entered the kitchen and accused the plaintiff of being involved and pushed the plaintiff causing his head to strike the steel bars on the walls knocking him unconscious and injuring the plaintiff’s neck,” his lawyers said in court documents.
In another the detainee said he had seen a fellow detainee climb to the top of a perimeter fence and jump into razor wire.
“Guards used a water cannon on the detainee who fell from the fence to the ground,” court documents allege. “After he landed, guards beat him with batons before he was taken away.”
Many of the refugees fled situations of violence, torture and persecution, including in Iraq and Iran, and their lawyers allege the government knew they were at risk of psychiatric injury. Despite their history of trauma, and clear signs that many were suffering in detention, their cases allege the government was negligent in failing to provide proper psychiatric care or treatment.
Most of the civil claims were lodged in 2014 in the district court. Just one of the 50 cases has made it to trial in the nine years since.
Shine Lawyers, which is representing all the SA refugees, says it fears the cases will languish in the courts for another decade.
“The first trial went for more than 150 days and the remaining trials could take anywhere up to 100 days each to complete,” a Shine special counsel, Mal Byrne, told Guardian Australia.
“Our clients will never truly be free from detention until their claims are resolved, they have gone from immigration detention to litigation detention, a fact which didn’t seem to concern the previous government.”
The home affairs department said that it was “aware of the cohort of claims in South Australian courts”.
“As the matters are currently before the court, it would not be appropriate to comment,” a spokesperson said.
The Howard-era policy of mandatory and indefinite detention in onshore centres like Woomera and Baxter, including of children, prompted widespread criticism from human rights groups and precipitated the notorious Pacific Solution.
Cabinet documents from 2000, released two years ago, show how the Howard government canvassed ways to deal with what it described as “an increasingly non-compliant population” in centres like Woomera.
The situation was so volatile, cabinet was warned, that it threatened to “go beyond the capacity” of Australasian Correctional Management, the private-sector company to which the government had contracted out detention centre management. Cabinet countenanced using the Australian defence force as a last resort.
In March 2000, the cabinet documents show, the then immigration minister Philip Ruddock sought additional sanctions for immigration detainees who engaged in “inappropriate behaviour”.
These included a new “non-warrant strip search power”, something the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade opposed outright, telling cabinet that Australia’s mandatory detention and temporary protection visa regimes had already “taken us close to the minimum standards of treatment the Refugee Convention, international and domestic law, and human rights standards will bear”.
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
