In January 2025, the UN Human Rights Committee issued two landmark rulings find that Australia remained responsible for the arbitrary detention of asylum seekers transferred to offshore facilities on the Pacific Island of Nauru, in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. One case involved 24 unaccompanied minors. The other involved an Iranian woman who was granted refugee status in 2017 but was detained for an additional 13 months.
Nine months later, in September 2025, Australia quietly extended its contract for running the Nauru detention facility until at least 2927, without public notification or parliamentary scrutiny. The facility currently holds 105 male asylum seekers, with many staying indefinitely.
Guardian.com
Australia response to being found responsible for arbitrary detention of children was to extend the contract. That is the policy.
What offshore detention is and what it does
Since 2013, Australia has operated what it called “offshore processing” of asylum seekers who arrive by boat. Intercepted at sea people are sent to detention facilities in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island nation, and in papua New Guinea on manus Island. The stated purpose is deterrence, to signal to people fleeing persecution that arriving by boat will not result in resettlement in Australia. The policy costs over one billion Australian dollars per year, regardless of how many people are detained.
Numerous reports have documented serious human rights violations against people held in offshore processing, including prolonged and arbitrary detention, physical and sexual assault, inadequate healthcare, and medical neglect, inhumane living conditions, and widespread mental health deterioration and self-harm. Since 2013, the Austrialian government has sent over 3,000 people to these institutions and temporarily returned more than 1,100 for medical reasons, indicating that the facilities are not equipped to provide care.
What the UN found happened to the children
The UN ruling from January 2025 is specific and damming. The first case involved 24 unaccompanied minors detained at an overcrowded facility with insufficient water supply and sanitation, high temparatures and humidity, and inadequate healthcare. Almost all suffered deterioration of physical and mental wellbeing, including self-harm, depression, kidney problem, insomnia, headaches, memory problems and weight loss. Despite all but one being granted refugee status around September 2014, they remained detained in Nauru.
The UN Committee found that Australia failed to justify why these children could not be moved to community detention on the mainland which would have been more appropriate for vulnerable individuals. It found Australia had violated their right to be free from arbitrary detention and their right to challenge their detention in court.
These were children. Recognized refugees. Held anyway.
This is a disability justice story
CripJustice identifies the harm that incarceration institutions do to people’s bodies. What Australia’s offshore detention system has done to the people it houses is cause disability through prolonged and arbitrary incarceration in settings that routinely deny medical treatment, mental health assistance, and basic necessities.
In July 2024, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre reported that many of the 96 persons detained on Nauru were suffering from physical and mental illnesses aggravated by substandard accommodation and inadequate medical facilities. Self-harm rates have been proven to be much higher in offshore detention than in onshore detention. PTSD, depression, and anxiety caused by protracted arbitrary detention are not incidental to the policy.They are the policy’s mechanism: make the conditions so intolerable that future asylum seekers would be deterred from coming.
This follows the same logic as solitary confinement in US prisons: employ psychological damage as a management tool. CripJustice has documented this with Kalief Browder, Ahmad Manasra, and scores of others. The Australian offshore detention system applies that logic to the whole asylum seeker population, including minors and those with pre-existing disabilities or medical conditions.
The disability accommodations gap
People with disabilities in offshore detention are experiencing a particular and documented crisis. Nauru’s medical facilities are inadequate for the general population and completely unequipped for persons with complex disability support needs. When people’s serious medical needs deteriorate, Australia temporarily transfers them to the mainland, addresses the current crisis, and then returns them. The Australian Human Rights Commission has been documenting this loop for over two decades and continues to challenge the system on human rights grounds.
The UN ruling said that Australia has the capacity to provide sufficient care for vulnerable persons on the mainland but chooses offshore detention instead. The decision to deny asylum seekers care is not due to a lack of resources. This is a political decision.
The connection to our existing coverage
We have written extensively about ICE detention in the United States, including the deaths of Chaofeng Ge, Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, Nhon Ngoc Nguyen, and Geraldo Lunas Campos, as well as the pattern of denying medical care to immigration detainees. We’ve written on the United States’ policy of deporting people to other countries in exchange for minerals deals. Australia’s offshore detention system follows the same logic as both: use detention as a political tool, restrict medical treatment and disability accommodations as a management strategy, and result in disability and death.
Australia’s offshore detention costs more than a billion dollars per year. That money does not go toward care. It goes to deterrent. The people whose bodies absorb the cost of that deterrence are asylum seekers who fled persecution, arrived by boat, and were transported to a Pacific island where they could not receive sufficient medical treatment, challenge their detention in court, or leave.
What accountability looks like
The United Nations determined that Australia was responsible. Australia denied responsibility and extended the contract. The Human Rights Law Centre is representing an Iraqi refugee fighting deportation to Nauru. Three additional refugees who were permanently exiled to Nauru in 2025 filed legal action to challenge their deportation. The Australian Human Rights Commission continues to examine individual complaints. The legal battles continue.
What meaningful accountability requires is what Australia has continually failed to provide: the closing of offshore detention, the resettlement of everyone currently detained, and independent access for human rights monitors to document what has already been done. The UN has declared the policy illegal. That decision resulted in no changes to the policy.
CripJustice recognizes that the use of detention for deterrence is a disability justice problem. When a state intentionally creates situations that result in psychological breakdown, physical degradation, and self-harm in order to prevent others from seeking safety, it is employing human bodies as policy tools. That is what offshore detention is. The contract lasts until at least 2027.
Sources
Timeline: Offshore detention — Human Rights Law Centre, July 2025
Immigration detention and human rights in Australia — Australian Human Rights Commission
Australia: Offshore Processing of Asylum Seekers — Library of Congress, 2024
