Freedom or a life without liberty

An Australian customs official with Sri Lankan refugees on board the Oceanic Viking. Photo: Reuters

MY feelings are dead. I have my body and my soul only. All my parts of the body are now stopped working properly. Hearing, looking, tasting and all the feelings are gone and I am living without anything. So says Arjuna.

Arjuna writes to stay sane, but feels like he is losing the battle. He survives on a diet of sleeping tablets and tries to keep thoughts of self-harm at bay by thinking of the wife and child he was forced to leave behind in Sri Lanka.

He wrote the words above on the eve of a court decision that will determine his fate and that of more than 50 asylum seekers, most of them Tamils like himself who have been found to be refugees but face the prospect of a life without liberty. They are owed Australia's protection under international law, but have been deemed threats to national security by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

Ranjini

This afternoon, the High Court will hand down its decision on a challenge by Arjuna to ASIO's refusal to spell out why they say he is a security threat, and the Gillard government's decision to detain him indefinitely.

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Arjuna (not his real name) is 36 and has been in detention in Australia for three years. The others are being held in detention centres as remote as Port Augusta in South Australia, and in Broadmeadows, Maribyrnong and Sydney. They include Ranjini, the pregnant mother of two young boys, and two other family groups with small children.

Arjuna fled his homeland in 2006 and registered his name with the United Nations' refugee agency in Indonesia in July, 2009. After four months of inaction, he paid a people smuggler to take him by boat to Christmas Island and, with 80 others, was taken on board a customs vessel, the Oceanic Viking, on October 18 after the boat was intercepted.

When the Oceanic Viking took them to an Indonesian port, the asylum seekers refused to disembark and a month-long stand-off ended only after a commitment that those found to be refugees would be resettled within another month.

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Freedom or a life without liberty