They tell stories of spending days in solitary confinement, being denied access to proper food and water, as well as prolonged physical and psychological torture, as part of an ongoing Senate inquiry.
How the Australian government responds to cases of wrongful detention overseas is currently the subject of a Senate inquiry.Professor Sean Turnell , Perth father Luke Cook and others have shared their stories of overseas detention and the fight to get home.
"It's funny, I suppose sometimes you'll talk about it and you'll remember something," he told the ABC, almost four years after his arrest. "I actually said to my wife just the other day that I hadn't had a dream for a long time, for a few months, and then I had one the other night," he said. "I think thinking outside the box around all these issues, about different mechanisms, is exactly what's necessary hopefully that's what this inquiry will bring out."At any given time, there are an unknown number of Australians facing imprisonment abroad, according to the Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance .
The seven-nation prisoner swap that saw three US citizens freed from Russia has been described as the "most far-reaching exchange between Russia and the West in decades". Here's why it's so significant. Human Rights Watch's Australia director Daniela Gavshon told the committee the lack of a system to identify cases was a "major barrier" to getting detainees the support they needed.
, accused of attempting to smuggle crystal methamphetamine into Australia via Thailand several years earlier. "I was just waiting for something to go wrong because I shouldn't have been there in the first place. "My nine-year-old son, who I remembered as a five-year-old, was doing quarantine with me and he didn't recognise his dad," he said.
" vitamins and medicine and food that they had bought me while I was incarcerated. So I had to pay them $1,000 and set up a payment plan, which I'm still paying $100 a month for.""It was standing in a shopping mall and not being hypersensitive, not worrying about the person behind me stabbing me or jumping me," he said.
"Otherwise, your mind is so busy with plotting the revenge of the justification and … the other side of that was to find peace and acceptance in squalor, in terrible, terrible conditions. "While you are clothed and fed, you are warm and you are safe — the safest you'll ever be — you are undergoing, I think, the utmost pain emotionally, psychologically," she tells 7.30.She called for better coordination between state and federal officials to support detainees and their families.
Other agencies have also told the inquiry giving families support to launch their own public campaigns could also be helpful. The inquiry has so far conducted two public hearings and received dozens of submissions from human rights organisations, families, researchers and others.Dr Moore-Gilbert was among those testifying to the committee during a public hearing on Friday.She had been invited to Tehran to attend an academic conference — she had been to multiple Middle Eastern countries previously and didn't expect any issues.
She said the lack of a definition of wrongful detention and a distinct process to handle such cases left many Australians to fall through the cracks.
Wrongful Detention Wrongful Detention Overseas Overseas Detention Sean Turnell Kylie Moore-Gilbert Luke Cook Cheng Lei
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