A Papua New Guinea (PNG) court has given hundreds of asylum seekers who were held for years in a controversial Australian detention center the right to sue the PNG government for compensation, Australian media reported yesterday.
PNG’s Supreme Court on Friday rejected an attempt by the PNG government to stop the asylum seekers seeking compensation, the Australian Broadcasting Corp reported.
The government had tried to argue that the time frame for such attempts to sue for compensation had passed, but the court rejected its application.
“The finding opens the way to a major compensation and also for consequential orders against both the Papua New Guinea and Australian governments,” Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul told the Australian Associated Press.
The decision comes two months after the PNG government closed the detention center on Manus Island, which had housed about 400 male asylum seekers.
Conditions in the camp, and another on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru, have been widely criticized by the UN and by human rights groups.
The two camps have been cornerstones of Australia’s contentious immigration policy, under which it refuses to allow asylum seekers arriving by boat to reach its shores.
The policy, aimed at deterring people from making a perilous sea voyage to Australia, has bipartisan political support.
The closure of the Manus Island camp, criticized by the UN as “shocking,” caused chaos, with the men refusing to leave the compound for fear of being attacked by Manus residents.
Staff left the closed compound and the men were left without food, water, power or medical support before they were expelled and moved to a transit camp.
PNG’s Supreme Court last year declared that the detention of asylum seekers on behalf of the Australian government was illegal and that it breached their fundamental human rights.
The asylum seekers will in February go back to court to seek orders from Australia and PNG for them to be settled in a safe third country.
The US on Friday announced that it had agreed to accept about 200 more refugees from Manus Island and Nauru under a deal struck between Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and former US president Barack Obama.
Another 50 refugees had already been accepted as part of the deal, under which Australia agreed to accept refugees from Central America. US President Donald Trump has called the deal “dumb.”
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