Court rules Australia can send asylum seekers to Nauru

A Bangladeshi woman, who can not be named, had gone to the High Court to challenge the legality of Australia paying the tiny Pacific nation to detain asylum seekers who attempt to reach Australian shores by boat.

The boy is one of 90 children, including 37 babies the Turnbull government wants to put on a plane, as early as next week, and send to Nauru’s offshore processing centre.

The full bench of the court on Wednesday rejected a legal challenge to the federal government’s offshore immigration detention regime.

Some anti-immigration politicians have looked to Australian policies as a potentially partial solution, while Brussels has called for an Australian-style paramilitary border force to police the bloc’s borders. Some 543 asylum-seekers were held on Nauru as of last November.

The Bangladeshi woman at the centre of the challenge sought a declaration that Australia’s conduct in sending her to Nauru was unlawful.

Asylum seeker advocate Meg Clark reacts to the High Court’s decision regarding allowing asylum seekers, including Australian born children to remain in Australia, at the High Court in Canberra.

“As I say, if people need prolonged support they receive it and we’ve provided significant support for a number of people who have come to Australia because they can’t get the requisite medical needs in Nauru or in PNG”.

“No one envisaged when this system was set up that two and a half years later, people – men, women and children – would be languishing in these centres facing indefinite detention”, he said.

Justin Gleeson SC disputed assertions during proceedings that the government was effectively responsible for the detection of people it transferred to Nauru because it paid for their temporary visas and funded the processing centre.

“But in Nauru and in detention centres where kids have been kept, sometimes for most of their life, we see very young children who just can’t take it anymore and try to kill themselves or wanting to hurt themselves, or saying things like, ‘I may as well just jump off the roof, ‘” he said.

All asylum seekers on Nauru suffer the effects of harsh living conditions: their mental and physical wellbeing is being eroded each day, driving people to self-harm and attempted suicide.

Zwi, meanwhile, said children kept in detention were so profoundly traumatised it was as if they had “been through a mincing machine…” Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young is expected to address that rally.

Mr Dutton’s office said there would be no comment in the lead up to the High Court decision.