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Australia’s system of indefinite immigration detention to face high court challenge
(www.theguardian.com)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Lawyers for NZYQ, the pseudonym of a stateless Rohingya refugee, have told the high court their client, aged 28 to 30, “may potentially be detained for life” unless it rules that people can only be held temporarily to facilitate their deportation.
According to court documents, NZYQ arrived in Australia by boat in September 2012, but had his bridging visa cancelled in 2015 when he pleaded guilty to sexual intercourse with a 10-year old minor.
They submitted the executive government has power to “exclude, admit and deport an alien” but if there is “no practical possibility” of doing so, then detention is not authorised for those purposes.
The Migration Act did not “authorise the plaintiff’s detention, based only on ‘the hope of the minister, triumphing over present experience, that at some future time some other state may be prepared to receive’ him”, the lawyers said, quoting Justice William Gummow’s dissenting decision in Al-Kateb.
Sanmati Verma, the acting legal director at the HRLC, said it should not be possible for governments to detain people for “as long as they choose, based on assurances about intentions and hypothetical future events”.
In December, lawyers for an Egyptian man, Tony Sami, sought to overturn Al-Kateb but were thwarted by the Australian Border Force “unwillingly” removing him after he spent a decade in detention.
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