Refugees have briefly taken control of two detention centers leased to the Australian government in Papua New Guinea in protest at the suspicious death of an asylum seeker.
The guards at the Australian refugee detention center were expelled by the frustrated asylum seekers on Saturday night, Thomas Lelepo, from Lorengau Police Station on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, said on Sunday.
“There was a situation there... over the death of a resident,” he said, adding that order had been restored at the camp.
The deceased refugee, identified as Faysal Ishak Ahmed from Sudan, earlier collapsed at the camp and was transferred to a hospital in Australia, where officials on Saturday pronounced him dead. He was 27 years old.
The Australian government has been relocating the refugees arriving irregularly by sea to its detention centers on Manus and Nauru islands.
Asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by boat are sent to these detention camps in order for their applications to be “processed,” yet, they are stuck there almost indefinitely and, according to numerous reports by rights organizations, are subjected to human rights violations. There have been reports of rape against the refugees, too.
The practice has been met with an international outcry.
On August 24, British daily The Guardian published an 8,000-page report, known as the Nauru files, said to have leaked from the Australian-run Nauru camp, detailing over 2,000 cases of sexual abuse and mistreatment against refugee children and women at the site between May 2013 and October 2015.
In mid-November, the Australian government said it had reached an agreement with the United States to resettle an unknown number of the refugees held at its offshore detention facilities to US territory.
No follow-up information was published on the agreement, including on if, when, and how it was implemented.
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