Australia pays £1.8m to hold single refugee

[DuctapeFatwa]

A Palestinian refugee has been kept in solitary confinement for nearly seven months on an island 2,100 miles north of Sydney at a cost of £1.8m, the Australian government admitted yesterday.
Since last July, Aladdin Sisalem has been the sole inmate of the Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea. The detention centre is part of Australia's policy to process refugees offshore, the "Pacific solution".

The cost of keeping the centre open is £300,000 a month. The immigration department says that £90,000 of that is spent directly on Mr Sisalem, with most of the rest paying for upkeep of the camp. Keeping a detainee in Australia's domestic detention centres costs around £2,000 a month.

A month ago, detainees in another camp on the Pacific island of Nauru ended a five-week hunger strike in protest at their situation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1146035,00.html

[NYC]

1. Supposedly serves another purpose.

Excerpt:

The immigration minister, Amanda Vanstone, told ABC radio: "We keep Manus not because there's one person there, (but) so that we can continue to deter the people-smugglers.

"Since we've had offshore processing centres ... people smuggling has dropped off dramatically, and as soon as we get rid of offshore processing centres ... the people smuggling, I confidently predict, will start again."

[DuctapeFatwa]

2. related story inside

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=359627

[NYC]

3. I saw that story.

I also saw that the picture in the article labelled "Detention Centres" pictured what I would call chicken wire, definitely not razor wire.

I wonder what is really going on. I read about conditions at a U.S. detention center for Haitians. Conditions were atrocious.