Human rights and the white saviour pattern in Australia’s immigration detention industry

ABSTRACT

For seven long years, the refugee men imprisoned at the Manus Island detention centre (prison) had their rights denied under Australia’s harsh border security policy. They did not appear into public view as the worthy subjects of human rights. However, when the Sri Lankan Nadesalingam family were finally released in mid-2022 and returned to their former home in Biloela, a small town in the Australian state of Queensland, it was celebrated as an example of Australia’s fundamental generosity and its underlying humanitarianism. Their release is a temporary fracture in Australia's story of preventable deaths, physical violence, torture, mental illness and despair, and the mundane violence of its border system. Using Makau Mutua's analysis of the human rights system, we reflect on how the Australian government presents itself as the saviour of particular individuals. The cruel paradox is that this reveals a familiar pattern: the government grants freedom with one hand, and jails with the other. Nothing changes for most of those who remain incarcerated or on temporary visas, either offshore or in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• human rights
• offshore processing
• Manus Island
• ‘Biloela family’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Although the men were transferred to an ‘open’ centre in 2017, this did not signal the end of detention, and it continued to be experienced as punishment. See Maria Giannacopoulos and Claire Loughnan, ‘Closure at Manus Island and carceral expansion in the Open-Air Prison’ (2020) 17(7) Globalizations 1118.

2 For more detail on this case, see Rachel McGhee and Katrina Beavan, ‘Biloela Tamil asylum seeker family make tearful return home after four-year struggle against deportation’ ABC Capricornia (10 June 2022) <www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-10/biloela-family-home-in-central-queensland-after-four-years/101137816> accessed 24 March 2023.

3 Eden Gillespie, ‘“Love conquered all”: Biloela welcomes home Nadesanlingam family after four years’ The Guardian (10 June 2022) <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/10/love-conquered-all-biloela-welcomes-home-nadesalingam-family-after-four-years> accessed 24 March 2023.

4 Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Hart Publishing 2001).

5 Hoda Afshar, ‘A Conversation Between Hoda Afshar and Behrouz Boochani’, Collecteurs (Omid Tofighian tr) <www.collecteurs.com/interview/a-conversation-between-hoda-afshar-and-behrouz-boochani> accessed 14 March 2023.

6 Giannacopoulos and Loughnan (n 1).

7 Victoria Pengilley, ‘Tamil asylum seeker family from Biloela could be undone by father’s travel and refugee activism, immigration lawyer says’ ABC News (2 September 2019) <www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-02/biloela-tamil-family-melbourne-federal-circuit-court-hearing/11468874> accessed 27 April 2023.

8 McGhee and Beavan (n 2).

9 The Guardian, ‘After four years, the Murugappan family begin journey home to Biloela’ The Guardian (7 June 2022) <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/08/after-four-years-murugappan-family-begin-journey-home-to-biloela>.

10 Gillespie (n 3).

11 Ibid.

12 Behrouz Boochani, ‘We pretend there has been a change under Labor but hundreds of refugees are still in detention’ The Guardian (26 July 2022) <www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/27/we-pretend-there-has-been-change-under-labor-but-hundreds-of-refugees-are-still-in-detention> accessed 12 March 2023. On the demonisation of those with a refugee background, see also Claire Loughnan and Philomena Murray, ‘Policy Paper: Combatting Corrosive Narratives About Refugees’ (2022) Comparative Network on the Externalisation of Refugee Policies, University of Melbourne <https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/4231587/CONREP-Policy-Report-3_Narrative_Loughnan-and-Murray_final.pdf>.

13 Jordana Silverstein, ‘Refugee children, boats and drownings: a history of an Australian ‘humanitarian’ discourse’ (2020) 17(4) History Australia 730 (Silverstein, ‘Refugee children’); Jordana Silverstein, Cruel Care: A History of Children at our Borders (Monash University Press 2023) (Silverstein, ‘Cruel Care’).

14 Andrew Hamilton, ‘The grace of courtesy’ (2022) 32(12) Eureka Street 19 <www.eurekastreet.com.au/article/the-grace-of-courtesy> accessed 24 April 2023.

15 Rachel McGee and Tobi Loftus, ‘Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets Tamil asylum seeker family after their return to Biloela’ The Guardian (15 June 2022) <www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-15/nadesalingam-family-meet-pm-after-return-to-biloela/101154338> accessed July 1 2023.

16 Hamilton (n 14).

17 Maria Giannacopoulos, 'The Nomos of Apologia' (2009) 18 (2) Griffith Law Review 331, 342.

18 Boochani (n 12).

19 Anton Lucanus, ‘On Sri Lanka, the New Labor Government Balances Border Security and Humanitarianism’ (2022) Australian Outlook <www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/on-sri-lanka-the-new-labor-government-balances-border-security-and-humanitarianism/>.

20 Boochani (n 12).

21 Makau Mutua, ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights’ (2001) 42 Harvard International Law Journal 201.

22 Silverstein, ‘Refugee children’ (n 13); Silverstein, ‘Cruel Care’ (n 13).

23 Loughnan and Murray (n 12).

24 Mutua (n 21) 203.

25 Ibid 227.

26 Ibid.

27 See an example here in this account of resistance at Manus Island, Behrouz Boochani, ‘Incarceration, Autonomy and Resistance on Manus Island’ (2018) 152 Arena 28.

28 Sajad Kabgani, ‘Time and Borders, Policy and Lived Experience A Posthumanist Critique’ in Behrouz Boochani, Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani (Moones Mansoubi and Omid Tofighian eds, Bloomsbury Publishing 2023) 59.

29 Mutua (n 21) 230.

30 Ibid 229.

31 Megan Stack, ‘Behrouz Boochani Just Wants to be Free’ The New York Times Magazine (New York, 4 August 2020) <www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/magazine/behrouz-boochani-australia.html> accessed 12 April 2023.

32 Wendy Brown, ‘Suffering Rights as Paradoxes’ (2000) 7(2) Constellations 230.

33 Ibid, 239.

34 Ibid.

35 Matua (n 21) 206.

36 Boochani (n 27).

37 Afshar and Tofighian (tr) (n 5).

38 Ibid.

39 Mutua (n 21) 219. See also Anna Szorenyi’s analysis of images of suffering and victimhood, and the distinction that is created between ‘authentic’ and ‘in-authentic’ victimhood in ‘The Face of Suffering in Afghanistan: Identity, Authenticity and Technology in the Search for the Representative Refugee’ (2004) 21(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 1.

40 Boochani (n 12).

41 Ibid.

42 Mutua (n 21) 208.

43 Boochani (n 12).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Behrouz Boochani

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker who has produced award-winning publications and creative works, documenting the violence of immigration detention prisons. Boochani was imprisoned in Papua New Guinea under by Australia under its ‘offshore processing’ policies for six years. He holds a number of honorary positions, including as Honorary Fellow, University of Melbourne. His book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018) has won numerous awards including the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, and Boochani has recently published an edited collection of his articles in Freedom, Only Freedom (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), edited by Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi.

Claire Loughnan

Claire Loughnan is a Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Her research examines diverse sites of confinement and the carceral expansion accompanying border control practices. She has published in journals such as Incarceration: An International Journal of Imprisonment, Detention and Coercive Confinement, Globalizations, and Australian Journal of Human Rights. She is a research partner with the EU-funded Comparative Network on of the Externalisation of Refugee Policies, and committee member of the Carceral Geography Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers. Her first book on the institutional effects of immigration detention is under contract with Routledge.