'It's torture, it's sheer torture'
February 8, 2005 - 9:31AM
Detainees at South Australia's Baxter Detention Centre were being psychologically tortured and humiliated, a volunteer worker at the centre said today.
Francis Milne, one of the centre's volunteers from the Uniting Church, said she witnessed detainees being humiliated while their mental conditions deteriorated.
She said one of the detainees she worked with, a 37-year-old Algerian man known only as Hassan, suffered great indignities during nine weeks in Baxter's isolation unit.
Hassan had been placed in the unit after he had threatened to commit suicide in frustration at the way he was being treated, she said.
"When they came to check out what was happening they came in force, that is the immigration officials, the guards there, and they made him strip," Ms Milne told ABC radio.
"They examined him and there were two females there, one was a psychologist, another one was an immigration officer.
"And the humiliation of having to bend over and be internally examined by people who are watching you as well as being on a video camera, he just felt was the greatest humiliation in his whole life."
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Details of Hassan's case come amid outrage at the treatment of Cornelia Rau, 39, a German-born Australian resident who was released from Baxter last Friday after 10 months in detention.
Ms Rau, a schizophrenic who was reported to police as a missing person, is also believed to have been confined to Baxter's isolation unit.
Ms Milne said authorities at Baxter refused to recognise the mental damage inflicted on detainees.
"It's torture, it's sheer torture, psychological torture," she said.
"You cannot justify it under any means at all.
"To put people who are psychologically damaged, who are psychotic, in such a thing is cruelty of an order people just can't believe."
Hassan said he fled Algeria for Australia in 2001 after suffering what he said was severe torture in his homeland.
While he had enough money to support himself in Australia, he was put in detention because his papers were not in order.
Hassan said Baxter inmates were prevented from having much contact with each other and made to stay in their rooms for most of the day.
"If good officers, they let us go out for four hours a day for fresh air," he said.
"If bad officers, we go out for half hour, one hour a day.
"It was terrible, especially at night. One o'clock, two o'clock. All the time (guards would open doors) because they want to search the room."
Hassan was released from Baxter last year and now lives in Perth while waiting for a decision on whether he will be granted refugee status.
AAP
