When Gus Kuster finished a one-year prison sentence in Australia, he hoped to rebuild his life there, in the only country he had ever known. Instead, as a noncitizen and stateless person, he spent the next five years shuttling between brutal immigration detention centers, seemingly with no release date in sight.
Dozens of other people, none of them Australian citizens, underwent the same experience. Some, like Mr. Kuster, have served time for minor crimes, others have been convicted of serious crimes such as murder, and some have no criminal background.
Australia has been criticized for years around the world for its harsh treatment of asylum seekers, many of whom are held in the country’s notorious offshore detention centers, where several dozen people still remain. But hundreds more are being held indefinitely in similar institutions ashore. Until recently, that included people who were once victims of life in Australia, then had that opportunity taken away after they committed crimes.
Last month, many of these indefinite detentions ended abruptly. A detainee successfully challenged the two-decade precedent in Australia’s highest court, and in the weeks that followed, more than 150 people were freed. As many cases are examined.
But the decision has drawn strong opposition within Australia, where many citizens feel that community safety far outweighs the country’s obligations to people who are both migrants and, in many cases, criminals.
The decision was also denounced by the political establishment, the news media and the public, saying that the formerly incarcerated did not belong to the general population. A handful of recently released detainees were arrested after being charged with new crimes, adding fuel to the fire.
Under pressure from the right-wing opposition, the government responded by quickly adopting strict requirements such as curfews and ankle bracelets on former detainees like Mr. Kuster, who in fact threw them into a different kind of purgatory. It also has established a “community protection board” of officials who will decide whether some of the worst offenders will again face preventive indefinite detention.
“If it were up to me, all these people would still be in detention,” Clare O’Neil, the home affairs minister, told Sky News. “Some of these people have done tragic, despicable things, and I don’t want these people in our country.”
Many Australians who cannot bear to be with these individuals have called for them all to be re-incarcerated – despite the cost to taxpayers of more than $280,000 annually per detainee, according to the Refugee Council of Australiaa nonprofit — or brought abroad.
That is absolutely impossible, said Alison Battisson, a lawyer with the firm Human Rights For All, which represented Mr. Kuster.
“No one with a criminal record has been transferred anywhere else,” he said. “It may sound unpleasant, but Australia is a rich country, and we can welcome these people.”
The detainees themselves appeared shocked from the experience, where they said they were moved from one detention facility to another. Some say they were served child-sized meals and subjected to what they described as inhumane treatment.
“It’s humiliating and demoralizing — the whole setup of it,” said Mr. Kuster, who was in prison for violating a restraining order and was released from immigration custody last month. “It’s a horrible, horrible place.”
A small number of those released under the new ruling have no criminal record. In 2013, Ned Kelly Emeralds, which legally changed his name as an act of dissidence, arrived on Australian shores on a boat after fleeing his native Iran. His appeals for asylum were rejected on the grounds that his fear of returning to his homeland was insufficiently grounded, but since he could not be deported under international law he found himself in detention .
“More than 10 years ago, I came to Australia to seek protection from torture in my country and instead I was tortured,” Mr. Emeralds said in a statement. “I have no way to escape. I couldn’t go home, and the government chose not to release me.”
Despite not being charged with a crime, he is now monitored with an ankle bracelet while his immigration status remains in limbo.
The sudden releases stem from a legal challenge brought by an ethnic Rohingya refugee who escaped Myanmar’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. Identified only as NZYQ, the individual was convicted of sexually abusing a child and, after spending more than three years in prison, was jailed for five years with an apparently indeterminate sentence.
Last month, Australia’s high court unanimously ruled that the practice was unlawful, in part due to the “absence of any real prospect of achieving the alien’s removal from Australia in a reasonable anticipated future,” and NZYQ was released.
Despite widespread outrage over the release of the detainees, human rights advocates welcomed the court’s verdict. They said these people should not face the kind of extrajudicial punishment that led to their indefinite detention, which Australian citizens are not subject to.
“The fact that an individual can be held indefinitely at the whim of the government has long been a stain on Australia’s international reputation,” said Graham Thom, a refugee adviser for Amnesty International Australia.
Mr. Kuster, 45, was brought to Australia when he was 4 years old, and had a permanent visa from the age of 15. Born in Papua New Guinea to a mother from that country and an Australian father of Indigenous descent, he is entitled to Australian citizenship — but was denied it last year on the grounds that he did not meet the “good character” standard. Throughout his adult life, he had multiple run-ins with the law, the most serious being drug charges and dangerous driving.
When he finished his one-year prison sentence in 2018, Mr. Kuster in Papua New Guinea, who declared him a non-citizen and immediately returned him to Australia. He spent the next five years in Australian immigration detention, where he says he saw no possibility of getting out or respite and was left to endure psychological damage.
In the detention centers, which he described as a “hellhole,” he was surrounded by other traumatized and sometimes suicidal individuals who themselves faced a desperate wait of years.
Mr Kuster, who is now at his parents’ home in Coolenture, Queensland, said the transition to life as a free man — of sorts — was more painful than joyful, after so many years in prison. “Even just thinking about liberating my family and being outside is traumatic for me,” she said.
New government laws to track Mr. Kuster and others are already facing legal challenges in the courts.
“This is clearly a deprivation of liberty,” said Michael Bradley, a lawyer in Sydney. “It’s almost house arrest.” People who don’t report ankle bracelets that have stopped working could face a minimum prison sentence of one year, he added.
The Australian government assumes that former refugees and stateless people are indeed a threat to the community and cannot or should not be fully reintegrated, Mr Bradley said.
“The idea that these conditions have any other function than to punish them – to basically impose a penal regime on them because they are bad people – is nonsense,” he said. “It’s a fiction.”
