Asylum seekers on Nauru won't be silenced

Transcript

Refugee advocates say asylum seekers protesting since early last week on Nauru are resolved to continue their action until they are determined to be refugees.

Their action is over the long time it is taking to process their applications as some people have been detained by Australia on the island for more than 1,000 days.

Australia's Refugee Action Coalition's, Ian Rintoul, told Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor that Australia needs to step up its responsibility to the asylum seekers.

IAN RINTOUL:  We don't believe that people should have ever been on Nauru in the first place, let alone be there for 1,000 days without having a refugee assessment. I mean it says everything that it is just a refugee prison, it's not a determination process, not a processing centre, there is no resettlement on Nauru, so our call is to move people from Nauru to Australia actually for the people themselves, the fact that they haven't got the immediate issues that they haven't got a refugee determination and despite the Nauruan government announcement at the end of last year, it said that everybody would be processed within a week but that was back in October, and here we are now almost in April and the Nauruan government hasn't managed to process the few hundred people we've had for over three years.   

 
MOERA TUILAEPA-TAYLOR: David Adeang, a government minister in Nauru, recently told a conference in Indonesia that there was absolute freedom there, free access, that things there seemed to be going really well.

IR: The conditions on Nauru are very well known, we've been able to speak regularly to the people who are not in detention, those who are found to be refugees. The fact that there is no resettlement arrangement, there's no future on Nauru, there's no education, there's no language, little housing, there's no jobs.  There is no resettlement, even in formal terms.  Nauru has said that they will issue 10 year visas but people determined to be refugees are not allowed to settle on Nauru, even if they wanted to.  David Adeang speaks about the conditions on Nauru, they Australian government are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the Nauruan government and so it's not surprising I think that David Adeang apologises for what are appalling conditions on Nauru.     

MTT: How long do you think the protests can continue?

IR:  Well, that's always hard to say, you know the people there are very determined, they are demonstrating every day, going down to the main gate to make the point.  It's a short walk for the asylum seekers to make that point, and they are quite determined to keep on protesting until they have found to be refugees.  It's not a lot to ask and it wouldn't take a lot from the Nauruan government to be able to meet that, some of the them have been a 1000 days, that's a long time to make that determination. The decision is made in some places within a few months.  Australia's got a bad reputation for the length of time it holds people in detention centres but if you look at the time that the UNHCR maybe takes in other places we are not talking three years those assessments can be made in Canada, the US, Britain and northern Europe in a matter of weeks in some cases. It's unforgivable that people held for so long on Nauru without getting a refugee determination.