Letter from Nauru

March 15, 2017 Ruth Halbert

Dear Prime Minister,

This letter was posted to Facebook from a detainee on Nauru:

Hi, I’m writing to you with lot of frustrations. We have been here for more than three years and we some of the refugees work for Broadspectrum. The wages for refugees is very low. $4.70 per hour. We agreed to work with that rate but BrS has made another rule for refugee employees. Refugees who work for BrS have no access for income support which was given by ABF. We refugees are being used as slaves. We have no right of freedom and no right of employment. How can we survive in this way? Why ABF is oppressing us in different ways? Australian government are running offshore processing centres and using these two offshore processing centres as work place for Australian. We are roughly 1100 Asylum seekers and refugees but the employees from Australia are more than us. What’s the point of creating job opportunities for Australian by detaining refugees and asylum seekers indefinitely? We are human beings and not animals. We have right to have family but Australian government has snatched our hopes and dignity. Please let us go somewhere else where we will be able to stay safely. please stop torturing us in the name processing. Your government of Australia are pretending to be good government but in reality, not. How long do we have to keep suffering in order to have our basic rights? We have come to Australia by boat but Article 31 of the Refugee Convention clearly states that refugees should not be penalised for arriving without valid travel documents. Could you please share my message with your friends? Thanks.

https://www.facebook.com/lynne.murphy.148/posts/10154430014676769?pnref=story

Slavery as well as illegal detention?

Close the camps and bring them here.