RefugeesArePeople Perth walk. Flickr/Louise Coghill. Some rights reserved.It’s no secret that Australia’s policy of mandatory and indefinite offshore detention is harming asylum seekers. Men detained in the Manus processing centre have died. Women and children detained on Nauru have been abused. The United Nations have repeatedly assessed conditions in the camps as in violation of basic standards of human rights.
But what makes these policies even crueller is their inflexible application. Gay asylum seekers face particular dangers under these policies: for example, gay men have been sent to Papua New Guinea, a country which has criminalised consensual homosexual sex between males.
Australian law now mandates that all asylum seekers arriving by boat should either be sent to Nauru or PNG’s Manus Island for processing. While families, women and children have been sent to Nauru, over 1000 single adult men have been transferred to Manus Island. If they are found to be refugees, they may then be resettled in PNG. Yet PNG’s criminal code makes it a serious criminal offence for a man to have consensual sex with another man, an act deemed to be ‘against the order of nature’. The penalty for such an offence is imprisonment of up to 14 years.
