Human Rights Day suicide attempt reaffirms detention centres as the Immigration Killing Fields
"Yet another suicide attempt overnight in the Northern Detention Centre in Darwin marks the start of Human Rights Day
for Australia, and this is ample proof that Human Rights are utterly unavailable and out of reach for people in
immigration detention," WA Human Rights group Project SafeCom said this morning.
"A man was hospitalised in Darwin earlier this morning after trying to kill himself. Two weeks ago another man tried to
kill himself in the Perth detention centre. Earlier this week someone tried to kill himself in the Villawood detention
centre; and in the last couple of months, three men killed themselves in Villawood. If anyone needs anymore examples
that the Immigration Department and the Immigration Minister are failing in their duty of care and the application of
human rights, they are clearly blind as bats," spokesman Jack H Smit said.
"Following the recent Full High Court case which ruled that full procedural fairness had to be applied to all refugee
assessments regardless of the mode of arrival, the Immigration Minister and his department should have been in an Unholy
Hurry to immediately - without a minute more delay than necessary - inform every single person who had arrived by boat
and who had rejected asylum cases that they would be re-interviewed and reassessed forthwith, but the department has
brazenly and arrogantly failed to be in a panic and in a hurry about this process, leaving thousands of asylum seekers
still in limbo of ongoing, damaging, and destructive detention."
"The bureaucratic tendency in the immigration department to underplay issues and regard everything as manifestations of
normalcy, the deeply entrenched mechanisms of encountering disasters with spin and nice media-ready words, and its
continuing deflection of criticism is not just a denial that there's anything wrong in immigration detention centres,
but it is becoming part of the reason that suicides and suicide attempts are taking place," Mr Smit said.
"We demand that the immigration department starts working around the clock, in shifts, and throughout the Christmas
holidays, to correct its wrongs as demanded by the High Court decision. If it does this, it may help to prevent more
incidents of self-harm, suicide attempts and suicides. It can stop immigration detention centres from being its own
Killing Fields."
ENDS