CANBERRA: After 10 years of the Australian government’s policy of imprisoning asylum-seekers without visas, human rights groups are optimistic that growing community concern at the human and economic costs of this hardline approach is slowly forcing changes to it.

“It’s time after 10 years to say “let’s look at better ways of doing this’ — and there are better ways of doing it”, said the spokeswoman for Amnesty International, Georgina Costello. “Detaining children for up to five years, frequent rioting and self-harm by detainees, are not acceptable by-products of refugee processing,” she said.

The practice of holding those asylum seekers who arrived on Australia’s shores without valid visas and passports were introduced in 1991 under a Labour government. The catalyst was the arrival by boat of several hundred Cambodian refugees, after several years of not receiving asylum seekers by boat.

“Initially people were housed in tents in camps in Darwin and then later moved to Melbourne and Sydney. In October 1991 the government started getting the sense we might lose these people,” said the Executive Director of the Refugee Council of Australia, Margaret Piper.

Rather than provide community-based accommodation without restrictions, the government opted to establish the first detention centre at Port Headland in remote north of Western Australia.

But this policy has received even more international criticism as violations of human rights in the past year, when the Australian government refused to let asylum seekers land on its shores, shipped them off its shores and looked for countries in the South Pacific to take them - while continuing to keep others in detention.

Given the controversy that Canberra’s policy has stoked, Costello is optimistic that Australia — the only government to imprison asylum seekers without the right to appeal to the courts — is gradually being forced to moderate its hardline policies against asylum seekers. “It is probably going to take a while though”, she said.

Three weeks ago, the government announced that the use of the Woomera detention centre in the South Australian desert, where asylum seekers staged a hunger strike early this year, would be phased out.

“That hunger strike forced the closure of the centre, though the government will never admit it,” said the executive officer of the Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace, Marc Purcell.

The hunger strike and other protests also forced the government to conduct a six-month trial at a cost of $550,000 , under which 25 women and children would be housed in the community outside the detention centre but under 24-hour guard.

“The government, to its credit, has implemented the trial release of women and children from the Woomera centre,” Costello said.

When the UNHCR and Australian government officials announced in early April that 280 people forcibly relocated by the Australian military to Papua New Guinea and Nauru had been found to be refugees, they were not released. Said Costello: “The growing refugee support movement is incredible. When people hear what is going on in the centres. they are very distressed about it. I think that movement will grow.” —Dawn/InterPress Service.