Conclusion

Abstract

The accounts presented here are of events occurring in Australia, but it is unlikely they are uniquely Australian phenomena. While the details of legal and policy frameworks may differ between jurisdictions, the legal and political positioning of being a non-citizen, of being reduced to a state of ‘naked humanity’ and consequently falling beyond most protections of the rule of law, are core to the asylum-seeking experience. Immigration detention centres are not subject to the same monitoring and scrutiny as prisons, and administrative decisions to detain are not made with judicial oversight or the suite of protections available to those accused of criminal acts. Standards of detention infrastructure and treatment are poorly defined and rarely legally enforceable. Independent scrutiny and monitoring is lacking, particularly by bodies with statutory power. Consequently, people’s experiences while classified as asylum seekers or detainees are too often dependent on charity (or lack thereof) and not right, and so are vulnerable to whim. As astutely articulated by Hannah Arendt more than half a century ago, the state of rightlessness means a world for the refugee in which ‘privileges in some cases, injustices in most, blessings and doom are meted out to them according to accident and without any relation whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do’ (Arendt 1958, 296). Administrative immigration detention is one of the most profound ways in which that rightlessness becomes starkly visible.