Dissident Spotlight: Behrouz Boochani
Behrouz Boochani arrived in Papua New Guinea seeking asylum in Australia. Instead, he was detained in a prison he described in his memoir years later.
In 2013, Australia’s Labor Party adopted a new policy to harden its stance on immigration. The party leader, Kevin Rudd, decided that asylum seekers must be processed in a detention center in Papua New Guinea. They would be processed and resettled there, keeping them out of Australia.
Behrouz Boochani arrived in Papua New Guinea seeking asylum and was detained on Manus Island for six years. The detention center was closed four years into Boochani’s sentence, but he wasn’t resettled for another two.
Boochani wrote about his journey from Kurdish-Iranian refugee to detainee to his path to citizenship in New Zealand through articles and messages he wrote through WhatsApp on a smuggled phone.
During his internment, Boochani alleged abuses, including beatings, solitary confinement, and was targeted for describing the bleak conditions of the detention facility.
He was able to flee from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 2013. The detention camp guards had him under their thumbs for six years.
Modern Doesn’t Mean Humane
Boochani was not a criminal. He was neither charged nor convicted of a crime. He legally sought asylum, but Australia’s Labor Party, its center-left “liberal” government, locked him and several hundred other asylum seekers in an offshore prison.
It wasn’t just a temporary processing center. It was a prison where detainees were kept for years under violent conditions. At least a dozen people died while they were under Australia’s responsibility, including from suicide and delayed medical care.
Liberal, tolerant societies are built to protect their people’s rights to view the world as they see it. Diverse worldviews coexist, and governments deplore the human rights violations in countries like Iran, Russia, and China.
But there’s always an underclass of people for whom that dignity does not apply. Prisoners of all kinds are often exempted from the kindness and tolerance we extend to people out in the world. Not all prisoners are sympathetic, but that’s no excuse for governments to treat them inhumanely.
Liberal democracies are only good places to live because of the effort put into protecting individual rights. Refusing governments the permission to carve out exceptions is a never-ending struggle.