ISLANDS OF DETENTION
Following World War II, most of the world’s countries signed international accords designed to prevent “refoulement,” or sending refugees back to places where they might be persecuted. But most governments still sought to block the entry of refugees; to do so without blatantly violating new international laws, they prevented people from setting foot on their territory and being able to ask for asylum.
One of the methods to achieve this was by offshoring the detention and processing of asylum seekers, which in the past few decades the United States has done more than any other country. In the early 1990s, the U.S. Coast Guard began intercepting asylum seekers at sea and taking them to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, where they were granted fewer rights than they would enjoy on the U.S. mainland, including access to information about their right to ask for asylum, their right to be represented by a lawyer, and their ability to file an appeal. At the height of this practice, in 1994, the base held more than 30,000 asylum seekers, most from Cuba and Haiti. With capacity at Guantánamo full, the Clinton administration sent 8,000 of the asylum seekers to Howard Air Force Base, in what was then the Panama Canal Zone, and to ships anchored in Kingston Harbor, Jamaica. Most who were found to meet the criteria of being persecuted at home were ultimately settled in the United States, but some were quietly resettled as refugees in other countries, including Australia, Nicaragua, Panama, Spain, and Venezuela, as a result of diplomatic favors from these governments.
Inspired in part by the Guantánamo model, the Australian government created its own offshore detention system, the so-called Pacific Solution. In 2001, the country’s special forces boarded a container ship carrying 433 asylum seekers, most of them from the persecuted Hazara minority group in Afghanistan. The Australian navy then transported the asylum seekers to two Pacific islands for detention: Manus, in Papua New Guinea, and Nauru, the world’s smallest island state. The countries, which were under Australian control for much of the twentieth century, accepted the deal in return for financial compensation and development aid.
From 2001 to 2007 and from 2012 to 2014, Australia sent 5,800 asylum seekers it had intercepted at sea to these islands. Hundreds who had been verified as refugees nonetheless remained detained there for years, because the Australian government wanted to deter more asylum seekers from using that route.