Ammon News - The day Farhad Bandesh turned 39, he heard the words he'd come to believe weren't possible, after almost eight years in Australian immigration detention facilities: "You're free to go."
For years, the Australian government had vowed never to allow asylum seekers like Bandesh, who had been processed on offshore immigration centers in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific nation of Nauru, to settle on its soil.
Now, suddenly Bandesh, and six others, were free in Australia.
"I was just shocked, I didn't know what to do," said Bandesh, a Kurdish refugee who fled Iran seeking safety Australia. "There is no more headcount, there is no high security, there is no fences. Wow."
Their release has given hope to other detainees.
"I am very happy for him," said Bandesh's friend and onetime roommate Mostafa Azimitabar, who remains detained in a Melbourne hotel with around 60 other men brought to Australia from PNG and Nauru for urgent medical treatment. "His happiness helps me not to give up."
Australia's Home Affairs department has declined to comment on the freed men, but their lawyers say they all had upcoming court hearings when they would argue they were being unlawfully detained.
Their release follows a landmark federal court ruling in September that ordered a man be freed under habeas corpus, a centuries-old legal principle that protects detainees from unlawful imprisonment. It's the first time it has been used in modern Australian legal history.
As the government prepares an urgent appeal against that September ruling in the High Court, human rights lawyers say they've been bombarded with requests from detainees to file similar cases.
Bandesh entered Australian waters after July 19, 2013, when Canberra announced that no asylum seekers who arrived by boat would ever be settled in Australia. Successive Australian governments have defended that policy, saying it has deterred both asylum seekers and traffickers who profit from their misery, saving lives at sea.
But Bandesh said he didn't know about the policy when he came ashore on the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island. "When I reached Christmas Island I thought, This is the freedom, the nightmare's over, I am a free man now," he said.
Instead he was assigned a number and crammed into a compound on a remote island, thousands of miles from Australia. Life inside the guarded Manus Island camp could be violent, when tensions erupted into riots.
Bandesh was granted refugee status but told he could only live in PNG or Nauru, another island nation that agreed to detain Australia's asylum seekers, or any other country willing to take him.
Others applied for a visa to live in the US, where 870 men have been resettled as of October under a deal struck between the countries' former leaders, according to Australian government figures. Some went home, either voluntarily or by force, and almost 300 remain on PNG and Nauru, of whom at least 70% are refugees.
Medical treatment in PNG and Nauru was poor, and so campaigners pushed for the sickest to be brought to Australia for treatment under Medevac, a law that allowed doctors to decide if detainees needed treatment on the mainland. It has since been repealed.
The law stated the men would be detained while they received treatment for various ailments including post-traumatic stress disorder, asthma, heart conditions, stomach illnesses and deteriorating mental health.
Bandesh was among the sick. He said he arrived in Melbourne in July 2019 to receive dental care and treatment for other mental and physical problems. He said in the past year he's received one root canal procedure, and was waiting for more.
The detainees are being held in a number of detention facilities, including hotels in Brisbane and Melbourne.
The men in the Mantra Bell hotel in Melbourne complained they were confined to one floor, with no access to outdoor areas and limited sunlight, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, when the only time they left the hotel was for medical appointments.
Australian Human Rights Commissioner Edward Santow said the commission's latest inspection of the country's detention facilities confirmed his concerns about the use of closed facilities to house asylum seekers and refugees brought to Australia for medical treatment.
"We are concerned that ongoing closed detention is likely to adversely affect the health of the people in this cohort," Santow said. He said the release of the seven men was a "positive step," but that all detainees receiving treatment should be released to the community, unless individuals posed a security risk.
The government said the men need to finish their treatment, then move on.
"Transitory people are encouraged to finalize their medical treatment in Australia so they can continue on their resettlement pathway to the United States, return to Nauru or PNG, or for those who are not refugees, return to their home country," a Home Affairs spokesperson said in a statement.
"No one under regional processing arrangements will be settled in Australia."
Bandesh said he thought the government would never free him, so he got a lawyer and decided to take his case to court.
*CNN
comment replay 