Freed from endless detention, they ended up in another limbo

When Gus Kuster served a one-year prison sentence in Australia, he expected to rebuild his life there, in the only country he has ever known. Instead, as a noncitizen and stateless, he spent the next five years living among grim immigration detention centers, with no release date in sight.

Dozens of other people, none of them Australian citizens, have been subjected to the same experience. Some, like Mr. Kuster, had served prison sentences for minor crimes, others had been found guilty of serious crimes such as murder, and a handful had no criminal background at all.

Australia has been internationally criticized for years for its harsh treatment of asylum seekers, many of whom were housed in the country the country’s infamous offshore detention centers, where several dozen people still reside. But hundreds of others are still being held indefinitely in similar facilities on land. Until recently, this included people who were once given a chance to live in Australia, only to have that opportunity taken away after committing crimes.

Last month, many of these indefinite detentions came to an abrupt end. A detainee successfully challenged the 20-year precedent in Australia’s highest court, and more than 150 people were released in the following weeks. Just like many cases are pending.

But the ruling has sparked strong reactions within Australia, where many citizens feel the safety of the community far outweighs the country’s obligations to people who are both migrants and, in many cases, criminals.

The political establishment, news media and the general public have also denounced the ruling, saying the former detainees are not part of the general population. A handful of the recently released prisoners have been arrested after being charged with new crimes, adding fuel to the fire.

Under pressure from the right-wing opposition, the government has responded by quickly imposing burdensome requirements, such as curfews and ankle bracelets, on former prisoners like Mr. Kuster, effectively putting them in a different kind of purgatory. It also has established a “community protection council.” of officials who will decide whether some of the worst offenders can again face indefinite preventive detention.

“If it were up to me, all these people would still be in custody,” Clare O’Neil, the home secretary, told Sky News. “Some of these people have done deplorable, disgusting things, and I don’t want these people in our country.”

Many Australians who find it intolerable to have these individuals in their midst have called for them all to be re-incarcerated – despite the cost to taxpayers of more than $280,000 per year per detainee, according to the Refugee Council of Australiaa non-profit organization – or transported to another country.

That’s essentially impossible, says Alison Battisson, a lawyer at the firm Human Rights For All, which represented Mr. Kuster.

“No one with a criminal record has ever been resettled anywhere else,” she said. “It may feel distasteful, but Australia is a rich country and we can house these people.”

Detainees themselves have emerged from the experience shaken, saying they were led from one detention center to another. Some say they were served children’s meals and subjected to what they describe as inhumane behavior.

“It’s humiliating and demoralizing — the whole setup of it,” said Mr. Kuster, who was jailed 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 his name legally changed in an act of dissidence, he arrived on the Australian coast on a boat after fleeing his native Iran. His asylum claims were rejected on the grounds that his fear of return to his home country was unfounded, but because he could not be deported under international law, he found himself in detention.

“More than a decade ago, I came to Australia to seek protection from torture in my country and I was tortured instead,” Mr Emeralds said in a statement. “There was no way I could escape. I couldn’t go home and the government decided not to release me.”

Despite never being charged with a crime, he is now being charged with one monitored with an ankle bracelet while his immigration status remains in limbo.

The sudden release has its origins in a legal challenge from an ethnic Rohingya refugee who escaped Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing campaign. The individual, identified only as NZYQ, was convicted of sexually assaulting a child and, after spending more than three years in prison, was kept in custody for five years of what appeared to be an indeterminate sentence.

Last month, Australia’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the practice was unlawful, in part due to “the absence of any real prospect of the alien’s removal from Australia in the reasonably foreseeable future”, and NZYQ was released.

Despite widespread outrage over the prisoners’ release, human rights activists have welcomed the court’s ruling. They say these people should never have suffered 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 detained indefinitely at the whim of the government has long been a stain on Australia’s international reputation,” said Graham Thom, refugee adviser for Amnesty International Australia.

Mr Kuster, 45, was brought to Australia at the age of four and had a permanent visa from the age of 15. Born in Papua New Guinea, the son of a mother from that country and an Australian father of indigenous descent. was entitled to Australian citizenship – but was denied this last year because he did not meet the criterion of ‘good character’. Throughout his adult life, he has had several run-ins with the police, the most serious of which were charges of drug use and dangerous driving.

While serving his one-year prison sentence in 2018, Mr Kuster was deported to Papua New Guinea, which declared him not a citizen and immediately sent him back to Australia. He spent the next five years in Australian immigration detention, where he said he saw no way to leave or get a reprieve and suffered lasting psychological damage.

In the detention centres, which he described as a ‘whole hole’, he was surrounded by other traumatized and sometimes suicidal individuals who themselves had to wait desperately for years.

Mr Kuster, who now lives with his parents in Coolenture, Queensland, said the transition to life as a free man has – in some ways – been more painful than jubilant, after so many years in detention. “Even just thinking about being released to my family and being outside was traumatizing for me,” he said.

The government’s new laws to control Mr Kuster and others are already facing legal challenges in the courts.

“It’s clearly a deprivation of liberty,” said Michael Bradley, a lawyer in Sydney. “It’s pretty much house arrest.” People who failed to report ankle bracelets that stopped working could face a minimum prison sentence of one year, he added.

The Australian government had taken the view that these former refugees and stateless people necessarily posed a threat to the community and could not or should not be fully reintegrated, Mr Bradley said.

“The idea that these conditions have any function other than punishing them – actually imposing a sanctions regime on them because they are bad people – is nonsense,” he said. “It’s a fiction.”