The Indefinite Despair report includes medical data MSF gathered during the past year while it was contracted by the Nauruan government to deliver mental health services.

These services were provided to Nauruans and to asylum seekers and refugees detained there under Australia's offshore detention policy.

The report says Nauruan and refugee patients show similar levels of mental illness that are far worse than other MSF projects around the world.

While stigma and a lack of understanding of mental illness were leading to poor healthcare for both Nauruan and detained people, the report says Nauruan patients were improving under MSF treatment while refugees and asylum seekers were not.

MSF also reports that rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts among the refugees and asylum seekers were exacerbated by family separation and the violence they experienced on Nauru (some of which was allegedly inflicted by authority figures).

The refugees' and asylum seekers' prior detention on Christmas Island was also found to be an exacerbating factor in poor mental health outcomes.

Using a mental health scoring method known as Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF), MSF says it found the situation on Nauru to be more severe than in many global emergencies it deals with.

The report says waiting in limbo for five years meant the Nauru detainees had a lower GAF score than torture victims MSF had treated.

"We found this loss of control was associated with major psychiatric illnesses such as depression, anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. We also found the loss of control was associated with higher rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts," said Dr Beth O'Connor, one of the psychiatrists involved.

The report found among 208 refugee and asylum seeker patients, 60 percent had suicidal thoughts and 30 percent attempted suicide, one as young as nine years old.

A breakdown in the relationship between MSF and the Nauruan government saw the doctors expelled in October this year, just 11 months after the contract began.

Source

• Doctors Without Borders
• The Guardian
• Radio NZ
• Image:The New Daily
  

Nauru has abolished a decades-old link to Australia's legal system, removing the island nation's highest court of appeal in a move critics have described as "shocking" and "concerning" for human rights.

On 12 December last year, the Nauruan government quietly informed Australia it wished to unilaterally withdraw from a treaty, signed in 1976, which made the Australian apex court the highest appellate court in the Nauruan justice system.

Nauru made no public announcement of its decision to terminate the treaty, which would take effect after three months.

On Good Friday, Nauru's Solicitor-General Jay Udit allegedly told Australian lawyers that the Nauru government had triggered the 90-day notice period to cancel appeals in December 2017 or January 2018.

The government announced on Monday that no new judicial appeals to Australia's High Court would be permitted under the now-defunct 1976 High Court Appeals Act.

No legislation has been enacted to establish a new local court of appeal.

The first consequence of this decision came on Tuesday when three Nauruans wanting to appeal their sentences were turned away from the Australian High Court registry in Sydney.

Former president Sprent Dabwido said this placed the three in a 'bizarre legal no man's land.'

He said the Australian government was complicit because the defence lawyers were not told the decision to end access had been made in December last year and that the registry staff 'had been instructed weeks ago not to accept any more Nauru appeals'.

Dabwido also said the Australian High Commission on Nauru had refused to speak on the issue, while Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had publicly backed the move by the Nauru government.

Source

• radionz.co.nz
• aljazeera.com
• radionz.co.nz
• theguardian.com
• Image: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

In 1992 we introduced a system of indefinite mandatory detention for asylum seekers who arrive by boat.

Since that time, we have accepted the idea that certain categories of refugees and asylum seekers can be imprisoned indefinitely; that those who are intercepted by our navy should be forcibly returned to the point of departure; that those who haven't been able to be forcibly returned should be imprisoned indefinitely on remote Pacific Islands; and that those marooned on these island camps should never be allowed to settle in Australia even after several years.

How then has this come to pass? There are two main ways of explaining this.

The first is what can be called analytical narrative: the creation of an historical account that shows the circumstances in which the decisions were made and how one thing led to another.

I have tried my hand at several of these.

The second way is to look at more general lines of explanation. I want to suggest five possibilities.

These general lines of explanation are not alternatives to each other but complementary. Nor do they constitute an alternative to explanation by way of analytical narrative.

Rather, they attempt to illuminate some of the general reasons the story took the shape it did.

Immigration absolutism
It is very common to explain the creation of Australia's uniquely harsh anti-asylum seeker system of border control as a partially disguised return of the old racism of the White Australia Policy.

This now seems to me mistaken.

Even though there have been occasional political hiccups - I think of Blainey in 1984, Howard in 1988, Hanson 1.0 in 1996 and Hanson 2.0 in 2016 - one of the more remarkable achievements of Australian history has been the seamless transformation of white Australia to a multiracial and multicultural society since the early 1970s. Continue reading

• Robert Manne is Emeritus Professor and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University.

Reagan Aliklik, the elder and landowner who donated the land for the church, shared a brief history of Adventism in the small nation.

He said a small group of Adventists made up of I-Kiribati and Solomon Islanders came to work in the phosphate mines in 1975 and started worshipping together.

Later, Nauruans who had studied in Adventist schools in Fiji, Kiribati and Papua New Guinea returned and joined the group.

Eventually, church ministers were sent to nurture and grow the small group.

Today, total membership has grown to more than 50.

Construction of the church began last year after lengthy negotiations. Land in Nauru is expensive and not easily transferred to others.

A three-bedroom house has also been built under the church for the resident pastor who up until now has lived in rented houses and temporary shelters.

There is enough space of the land to build a primary school, and plan are in hand for this.

The church reports that Church members have also been actively involved in visiting asylum seekers at the processing centre on Nauru.

Religious affiliation in Nauru
Protestant 60.4% (includes Nauru Congregational 35.7%, Assembly of God 13%, Nauru Independent Church 9.5%, Baptist 1.5%, and Seventh Day Adventist .7%), Roman Catholic 33%, other 3.7%, none 1.8%, unspecified 1.1%

Source

• adventistreview.org
• adventistreview.org
• record.adventistchurch.com
• httgcatholic.org
• Image: adventistreview.org

This style of diplomacy has been going on for a number of years.

Whether it's morning-after kayaking on Sydney harbour or taking in our own Southern Alps, the annual Prime Ministerial sleepover says a lot about the relationship between New Zealand and Australia.

That relationship is almost unique for neighbouring countries - close enough culturally and historically to share a lot in common, but far enough away geographically to never have come into real conflict over borders or resources.

The relationship is built on shared values.

They include a strong sense of internationalism, of doing our bit in the world, whether that's in foreign conflicts, peacekeeping or overseas aid. And they include a commitment to honesty and giving people a fair go.

As anyone who can remember a childhood game of truth or dare will know, late at night on sleepovers is when a new level of honesty comes out.

It's when the relationship deepens - when we share secrets and tell the truth.

And that's what we need from English and Turnbull at Friday's soiree, because right now the Australian Government is betraying our shared values.

What has emerged in Australia in recent years would have been difficult to imagine just a decade or two ago.

On Nauru and Manus Island, over 2,000 refugees and people seeking asylum have been forcibly detained in conditions that Amnesty International has found amounts to the legal definition of torture - not a statement we make lightly.

In a tacit admission of guilt, when the Australian Government recently signed on to the UN's Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, they wrote in a carve-out for their refugee 'processing centres' on Nauru and Manus Island, knowing they would not pass international scrutiny.

Things are so bad, so hopeless, that after three years of cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment on Manus Island, 21-year old Iranian refugee Loghman Sawari recently fled in a bid for asylum in Fiji.

Sadly, he was forcibly returned to Papua New Guinea to languish there some more.

This is not compassion. This is not a fair go. Continue reading

• Grant Bayldon is executive director of Amnesty International NZ.

Amnesty International is calling on New Zealand to take a lead in exerting international pressure on Australia over its detention centre on Nauru.

Amnesty has condemned Australia's offshore detention regime on Nauru as an "open-air prison" and akin to "torture".

New Zealand has offered to take 150 of the asylum seekers, but Australia says it must deal directly with Nauru, and the offer is stalled.

Amnesty's senior crisis director Anna Neistat said New Zealand had a crucial role as one of Australia's key partners.

"International pressure should start from the region where New Zealand is undoubtedly the most serious player who could challenge Australia's policy and, to a certain extent, show to Australia that things can be done differently."

Amnesty says refugees and and asylum seekers are attacked with impunity, healthcare is inadequate or non-existent, and suicide attempts, including among children, are common.

Neistat, who interviewed dozens of the 410 detainees in July, says asylum seekers are undergoing extreme suffering which amounts to torture.

On her visit to Nauru she found:

• A seven-month pregnant Iranian refugee attempted to hang herself,
• Suicide attempts by children were commonplace, including by a 13-year-old boy who had attempted to kill himself multiple times - with a knife, with petrol and by drowning himself in the ocean -
• A 15-year-old girl who had tried to kill herself twice, saying "I'm tired of my life".
• A refugee family who moved into the Nauruan community were repeatedly attacked in their home and their property destroyed.
• Guards in the processing centre have assaulted, abused and threatened refugee children.
• A young girl who was prescribed adult antidepressive medication that has a "black box warning" against its use by children, because it causes suicidal thinking.
• Staff on the island reporting that people are discharged from hospital even when they are "still sick, sometimes half-conscious

Source

• radionz.co.nz
• nzherald.co.nz
• theguardian.com
• Image: thebloggersden.com

As well as going after $6.7 billion in its omnibus savings bill, it could go after the billions more it costs to run our immigration detention centres: $9.2 billion in the past three years, $3.9 billion to $5.5 billion in the next four, according to the most complete accounting yet of the costs normally hidden in inaccessible parts of the budget.

It comes as an Audit Office report identifies the cost per offshore detainee: a gobsmacking $573,100 per year.

For that price - $1570 per day - we could put them up in a Hyatt and pay them the pension 15 times over.

It costs less than half that, $200,000 a year, to house a typical onshore prisoner; a mere fraction of that, $72,000 including super, to pay a typical full-time worker, and just $20,700 a year to pay a full pensioner.

Ninety-nine per cent of the population don't come anywhere near $573,100 a year in income or cost. The census stops asking when income sails past $156,000.

But the comparison with wages isn't strictly valid. It understates the outrageousness of the $573,100 price tag.

The $573,100 isn't being paid in return for a detainee's labour, in return for a contribution to society, as are wages.

It is being paid to prevent the detainee contributing to society.

It is what economists call a deadweight loss.

We get nothing in return for it, apart from less of what we could have had.

And perhaps because it is not meant to make economic sense (and perhaps because the Department of Immigration and Border Protection has operated as something of a law unto itself), it hasn't even made financial sense.

The Audit Office says the department breached public service guidelines by not conducting proper tenders for the contracts to provide services to Manus Island and Nauru, at times falsely claiming it faced urgent and unforeseen circumstances. Continue reading

Sources

• The Sydney Morning Herald article by Peter Martin, economics editor of The Age
• Image: France 24, The Observers

Appearing on the ABC's 7.30 program last Thursday, after The Guardian's release of 2000 incident reports from Nauru, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton told Leigh Sales, "I would like to get people off Nauru tomorrow but I have got to do it in such a way that we don't restart boats."

He went on to say, "We have had discussions with a number of other countries, but what we're not going to do is enter into an arrangement that sends a green light to people smugglers."

Dutton appreciates that Nauru and Manus Island are ticking time bombs.

During the election campaign, Malcolm Turnbull said that we could not be misty-eyed about the situation on these islands, a situation of Australia's making and a situation funded recurrently with the Australian cheque book. Now that the election is over, neither our politicians nor their strategic advisers can afford wilfully to close their eyes to the situation.

The majority of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island have now been proved to be refugees. They are not going to accept cheques to go back home and face renewed persecution. That's why they fled in the first place. Most of these people have had their lives on hold, in appalling circumstances, for over three years.

It's time to act. Ongoing inaction will send a green light to desperate people to do desperate things.

While respecting those refugee advocates and their supporters who cannot countenance stopping the boats coming from Indonesia, I think it is time to see if we can design a way of getting the asylum seekers off Nauru and Manus Island "in such a way that we don't restart boats," ensuring that we continue to send a red light to people smugglers in Java. Continue reading

• Father Frank Brennan, S.J. is Professor of Law at the Australian Catholic University.

This comes as Canberra rejected a report by the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International which found that it is ignoring appalling human rights abuses against asylum seekers and refugees held in detention on Nauru.

In a statement, Australia's Department of Immigration and Border Protection said it strongly refuted many of the report's allegations, and that it does not exert control over Nauru's laws. Continue reading

Paul Stevenson has had a life in trauma. The psychologist and traumatologist has spent 40 years helping people make sense of their lives in the aftermath of disaster, of terrorist attacks, bombings and mass murders, of landslides, fires and tsunamis.

He's written a book about his experiences, Postcards from Ground Zero, and for his efforts in assisting the victims of the Bali bombings, the Australian government pinned an Order of Australia Medal to his chest.

Now, he says, it is the Australian government deliberately inflicting upon people the worst trauma he has ever seen.

Over 2014 and 2015, Stevenson made 14 "deployments" - as they are called in the militarised argot of those secretive worlds offshore - to Manus Island and Nauru, where about 1,500 asylum seekers who tried to arrive in Australia by boat are held on behalf of the Australian government. His role was to counsel and care for the mental health of the Wilson Security guards.

Stevenson is president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Democrats. The party is not registered in the state, so he is standing in this federal election as an independent, with the support of his party.

He doesn't know whether his slim electoral chances for a Senate seat - "somewhere between zero and a half" - will be helped or harmed by speaking to the Guardian. But he says he feels it is incumbent on those who have been inside Australia's offshore detention centres to tell those at home the truth about regional processing.

He says he approached the Guardian, compelled by conscience to speak, "because I believe in our democracy".

Over a career spanning decades Stevenson has worked with the survivors of the Port Arthur massacre, the Thredbo landslide, the Boxing Day Indian Ocean tsunami, the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005. He has counselled diplomats after embassies were bombed, and families who have lost loved ones to bushfires and floods.

Stevenson says that the great privilege - "the joy, even" - of working in the field of trauma is witnessing people fight back from cruel circumstance, working with people "who are incredibly brave, incredibly resilient, incredibly positively focused about what they're doing". Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian, from an article by Ben Doherty and David Marr, who work for The Guardian.
• Image: CPA

A new act replaces a former criminal code that dated back to 1899 and was based on old Queensland laws.

The law reforms come after a number of incidents at the Australian refugees' detention centre, which is based there, focused international attention on Nauru.

The revised laws state that suicide is no longer an offence and is considered "more a mental health issue rather than a criminal law issue", the government said in a statement.

Homosexuality is no longer a criminal offence.

The archaic Queensland criminal code derived its anti-homosexuality laws - "carnal knowledge against the order of nature" - from the British 1860 anti-sodomy laws, which were exported to Australia in the Victorian era.

In addition, the law reforms broaden the definition of rape to include marital rape, and introduces the offence of stalking.

The death penalty has been removed as a punishment from Nauru's statute books, the government has said, as has hard labour and solitary confinement.

Slavery has been criminalised, as well as child labour, and "forcing a child to marry another person in exchange for a material benefit".

Abortion remains illegal when not part of a "lawful medical procedure".

Source

• www.smh.com.au
• theguardian.com
• Image: radionz.co.nz

Dozens of Australians sit up all night, every single night, comforting asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru. You don't have to, therefore the task falls to the advocates.

Let me tell you what this entails, since your statement blaming advocates for suicide attempts - of actually encouraging self-harm - suggests you are clearly unaware.

It is mind-blowingly hot on Manus and Nauru during the day, so our friends there try to sleep. We, safely onshore, sit tensely in the evenings, watching for the little green light that signals people have come online.

When someone doesn't show up, there is a flurry of frantic calls between advocates; when did you last hear from them? What did they say? Are they in danger of self-harm? Who do you know in the same compound?

The result of these calls can be anything from relief upon locating our friend, safe and sound, or that which is becoming more common - they've harmed themselves and are in International Health and Medical Services, or have been beaten by guards and thrown into solitary confinement.

We cannot sleep, Mr Dutton. We can close our eyes, but the horrors we are witnessing don't go away. And on the rare occasions we actually do get to sleep, we know there are no guarantees that our loved ones will be unharmed when we wake.

I will never forget the last night I actually slept for eight hours - it was in September last year, and I woke to discover one of my dearest friends on Manus had stabbed himself in the neck.

He apologised over and over again, he knew he'd broken his promise not to hurt himself, but after three years of incarceration, beatings from the guards and locals, as well as untreated medical conditions, the psychological damage means we cannot expect them to always have control over their behaviours.

He has since tried to drown himself, and I live in constant fear of losing him. Continue reading

• Sarah Smith is a refugee advocate for asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island.

And the finding by the supreme court of Papua New Guinea that detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island is illegal, brings shame on us as a nation. As does our refusal to accept the offer made by New Zealand to settle some of those, like Omid and this young woman, who have been found to be refugees.

The stubborn and divisive repetition of slogans about tough border protection and deaths at sea fails to justify the bribing of our neighbours and deliberate destruction of the lives of those who have sought asylum here. It is long past time for a bipartisan solution.

I am a child psychiatrist. I have visited families held in detention on and offshore and have seen lives diminished and destroyed as a consequence. I have also worked in child protection and know how much we invest in supporting families, in protecting Australian children from exposure to violence and neglect and in reducing family and sexual violence. But these refugee children, these people seem to be different, not entirely dispensable but almost, used by successive governments as deterrence.

They are hostage to our brutal domestic politics, the children unable to gain the safety their parents sought for them, at risk, held in inadequate and harsh environments, with despairing, desperate and now dying adults.

Trauma and despair are contagious. At least one other refugee has set herself alight but Omid's death also affects those who knew and loved him, the children and adults who saw him burning, and those staff who were responsible for saving him in a situation where adequate emergency care was reportedly not available or was delayed. Continue reading

• Dr Sarah Mares is a child and family psychiatrist and in 2014 was consultant to the Australian Human Rights Commission National Inquiry into Children in Detention.

A recent Australian court decision stated the lawfulness of the offshore detention regime on Nauru.

This means 267 asylum seekers on mainland Australia could be returned there.

But 10 Anglican and Uniting churches around the country have offered sanctuary to the asylum seekers who are at risk of being returned.

The concept of church sanctuary has no basis in Australian law.

But immigration minister Peter Dutton said the government would not be "dragging people out of churches".

He said that the people's cases would be considered individually on medical advice.

Continue reading

New Zealand had been giving Nauru $1.2 million a year, paid out quarterly.

Mr McCully said several incidents had caused him concern, including the removal of senior members of the judiciary. Continue reading

New Zealand provides 600-thousand US dollars a year to fund Nauru's justice system.

New Zealand's Foreign Minister, Murray McCully, says he's deeply concerned about recent developments but doesn't want to put Nauru's judicial system under any further pressure by pulling aid.

"If we were simply to depart the scene, then that leaves the Australians carrying effectively all of the burden and also means we put under further pressure the judicial systems we're already concerned about."

"So our starting point is always to find a way of dealing with the issues and finding a way forward rather than pulling the plug on what is not a big development initiative," said McCully.

But former Chief Justice Geoffrey Eames, who resigned after not being allowed to return to Nauru from his Australian base, says that's a weak response.

"It should not be supporting it, it should be saying 'this is an absolutely appalling abuse of power.' I think the minister has got to make himself so plain to the present government that they accept that a change must occur and unless something is done, well, New Zealand is propping up a system that is simply unjust."

Three opposition MPs have been arrested and charged, while other MPs have had their passports suspended following protests at parliament last week, which the government has dubbed a riot.

The government has also controversially banned Facebook and passed laws to curb protests and public assembly.

Source

• radionz.co.nz
• radionz.co.nz

The group were held at sea for a month after their boat, which set sail from Pondicherry in India, was intercepted in June.

They were moved to Australia's mainland, to the remote Curtin Detention Centre, to meet Indian officials, but refused to speak with them.

India had promised to take back its nationals.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said the group would either be resettled in Nauru or deported to Sri Lanka, where they are thought to come from.

Last month, the Australian Churches Refugee Taskforce blasted the nation's border security policy over its treatment of minors.

The policy was called "state-sanctioned child abuse" in a report by the religious leaders.

The task force called for a royal commission into the plight of child migrants who suffer "terrible" abuse before being "dumped" offshore.

It also called on Mr Morrison to renounce his legal position of guardian of all unaccompanied minors.

"The minister forsakes his guardianship duties when he sends unaccompanied children to the detention camp in Nauru," the report said.

Australia changed its policy on unauthorised boats in December to crack down on people-smuggling.

Under the new policy, all asylum-seekers arriving by boat are sent to Nauru or Papua New Guinea for processing and resettlement, even if they are found to be refugees.

The Australian government says its aim is to save lives by preventing people getting on dangerous boats.

The most recent arrivals are the first to test the new policy.

In 2012, legislation was passed to allow offshore processing of asylum seekers in Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

The legislation stripped away legal safeguards for asylum seekers subject to offshore processing.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott defended the latest transfer, saying he was confident it was safe to send people to Nauru.

Sources

• BBC
• Al-Jazeera
• Refugee Council of Australia
• Image: Sydney Morning Herald

Mark Isaacs has described his experience in his book, The Undesirables which was due for for publication next month, but has been rushed out by publisher in the wake of the chaotic riot at the Manus Island detention centre last month.

He worked on Nauru between October 2012 and June 2013 and says he found harrowing conditions at the centre with dozens of asylum seekers suffering mental breakdowns while in indefinite detention.

Isaacs was only 24 when, on the strength of a single phone call and with no experience, he was hired by the Salvos and sent to Nauru with less than a week's notice to "provide support" to asylum seekers detained there.

The title of the book is taken from a term Isaacs says a government staffer was overheard using to describe the asylum seekers at the camp.

Source

• Radio New Zealand International
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Image: Sydney Morning Herald

During the election campaign he told Neil Mitchell the 'tent city' asylum seeker policy would cost about $50 million to set up.

Abbott said reports of $75 a week in handouts for asylum seekers was incorrect - "we're looking at more like $5 a day (while in a processing centre)".

However, Mr Abbott wouldn't say what support would be provided outside the processing centre.

Father Frank Brennan, who is professor of law at the Australian Catholic University's public policy institute and a confidante of the Prime Minister, believes a deterrent is needed in the border protection policy mix but thinks that has to involve Malaysia and Indonesia and he's dismayed by the PNG plan.

According to Brennan "If the High Court were not to look at this we would be told that in jurisdictional terms the Australian executive government could do what it damn well likes and could never been supervised by the courts and could never again be supervised by the parliament. I think there's no way the High Court of Australia will wear that."

Brennan said he is "very concerned that what we've now got to is a situation when we go into electoral mode where we as Australians are led by politicians who trash the processes that are necessary for detailed bilateral negotiations with neighbours such as Indonesia and Malaysia."

Source

• ABC Transcript
• 3AW
• Image: 2.bp.blogspot.com