Australia has been heavily criticised for its harsh immigration detention practices. It is the only country in the world that has legislated mandatory indefinite and arbitrary immigration detention for those present without a visa. It has also established offshore detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island for asylum processing, the conditions of which are, as Amnesty International explains, tantamount to torture. From mid-2013, in the second and current phase of Australia’s offshore processing, children have been sent solely to Nauru. Initially children were held in closed detention conditions in Nauru. In October 2015 the detention centre became ‘open’, although those inside the camp continue to face curfews, monitoring and other restrictions. Those recognised as refugees are released into the Nauru community but no durable solution for their resettlement has been found. The practices and conditions of offshore processing, which has operated for a total of 13 years, have been shrouded in secrecy. A recent raft of leaked official incident reports  (‘the Nauru files’) concerning the detention centre in Nauru has confirmed the damaging impact of these arrangements particularly on children.

Guest post by Louise Boon-Kuo, Lecturer at the University of Sydney Law School. Louise researches in the areas of border policing, race and criminal justice, is the author of Policing Undocumented Migrants in Australia (Routledge, forthcoming 2017), and can be found on Twitter @boonkuo. This is the ninth instalment of Border Criminologies’ themed series on…

via Institutional child abuse in offshore processing on Nauru — Border Criminologies blog