Stuck in the System

Two

years after he walked free from Sydney's Villawood detention center, Mohsen Sultany should be enjoying his freedom. But the 34-year-old, who fled Iran to avoid persecution for his political beliefs and is now studying surveying and writing poetry, has frequent nightmares and panic attacks; the verse he writes is always dark. He has been recognized as a refugee by the Australian government, but he can't shake free of the four years he spent in detention fighting for that recognition, or forget the attempted suicides, mental illness and mistreatment he saw there. He still becomes upset when he talks of the friends he left behind. "They have to wait without any future," he says, "If you can't even write your name in English, how can you fight for your rights in the courts of Australia?" Instituted by a Labor government in the early 1990s, Australia's policy of detaining all who arrive on its shores illegally has been continued by the conservative government of John Howard since it first won office in 1996. It's a policy as controversial as it is implacable - and it has seldom stirred more debate than since the revelation on Feb. 4 that a mentally ill Australian woman, Cornelia Rau, had been held for four months at South Australia's remote Baxter detention center after claiming to be an illegal immigrant from Germany. Among Australia's long-term detainees are those who have been denied refugee status; some, like Kashmiri Peter Qasim, who has been held for nearly seven years because India will not accept him without any identification papers, could spend the rest of their lives in detention.

Others who have spent years in limbo are still awaiting a decision, and Time has been told that for many of these people, Australia's system for processing visa claims is not moving quickly enough. It's claimed cases are so hampered by delays, challenged decisions and inadequate legal advice that some people who are eventually deemed genuine refugees wait in detention, often with damaging pyschological results, for years. Recently released on a temporary protection visa, Farhad doesn't want to give his real name for fear that he might jeopardize his chances of being allowed to live in Australia permanently. But when the 31-year-old Iranian was stopped nearly five years ago with 120 other people in a boat heading for Australia, he says the rough reception from officials convinced him that he'd fled into a situation as intolerable as the one he'd left. Certain he was about to be deported, Farhad feared that if he told immigration staff about his clandestine pro-democracy activities, they might send the information back with him to Iran. "So I kept the story of my life short. I decided it was best to be silent."

When his bid for refugee status was rejected after the initial interview, Farhad appealed to the Refugee Review Tribunal, where he gave more details of his background. But immigration lawyers say applicants who appear to add new elements to their story at this stage are immediately under suspicion - Farhard was rejected there, too, and says the refugee review tribunal member hearing his case accused him of lying. What followed was a long legal fight over the tribunal's decision not to accept a letter he had received after his hearing from a senior Iranian cleric who supported Farhad's claim that he'd been a dissident. When Farhad was first put into detention, he thought it would be "two or three months and then I could be released to be a good community member for Australia." It would be four and a half years before his case was finally decided. South Australian lawyer Claire O'Connor says the Baxter detainees she represents routinely wait more than a year for court judgments, of which they may have several. The troubles of one 21-year-old Afghani who won his case late last year after four years locked up is, she says, typical: "He can't sleep, he can't eat, he has panic attacks and depression - and all because of detention. What I cannot understand is that 87% of people who arrive by boat are eventually released on visas, and yet many of those are spending years in detention." Despite repeated requests, Federal Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone chose not to speak to Time.