Rally for Refugee Rights
Saturday 5 November at 12 noon State Library.

A Sri Lankan man committed suicide in Sydney's Villawood detention centre this week. The man, who had been granted refugee status, was driven to take his life because of his ongoing incarceration and the refusal of authorities to allow him the right to attend a religious festival.

This incident highlights the brutality of Australia's mandatory detention (incarceration) of refugees.

Professor Patrick McGorry, professor of youth mental health at the University of Melbourne and Australian of the year in 2010, described Australian’s Asylum Seeker detention centres as ‘factories for producing mental illness’.

Research carried out in 2006 by the Psychiatric Research and Teaching Unit of the Liverpool Hospital (NSW) into the impact of immigration detention and temporary protection on the mental health of asylum seekers found that:

Past immigration detention and ongoing temporary protection each contributed independently to risk of ongoing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression and mental health-related disability. Longer detention was associated with more severe mental disturbance, an effect that persisted for an average of 3 years after release.

This latest tragic incident also vindicates our Union’s call for mandatory detention to be ended.

As members will recall, the following motion was passed at the HSU#4 AGM. We have also taken the motion to the National Executive of the HSU for the consideration of other Branches.

We, as psychologists and other health professionals, take a stand against practices that increase the incidence of mental illness in the community by calling for an end to the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, and calls on the Federal Government to respect the recent High Court decision and abandon offshore processing of asylum seeker claims and adopt a policy of onshore processing only.

Voice our support for the rights of asylum seekers on Saturday 5th November at 12 noon in front of the State Library (corner of La Trobe and Swanston streets Melbourne). The message from the Rally: the community says

• No to offshore processing
• No to offshore solutions
• No to mandatory detention