‘Closure’ at Manus Island and carceral expansion in the open air prison

Disrupting State Spaces: Asylum Seekers in Australia’s Offshore Detention Centres

“…This decline can be seen as a sort of 'shady nationalism', both in the sense of dubious acts of state that are occurring in the shadows, for example the exorbitant costs and claims of corruption attached to the tender process for external service providers to the centre, and the murky nature of the state's nationalist agenda toward asylum seekers, applying a form of racialized migration and citizenship to seeking asylum (Sharples and Briskman forthcoming). In the process, the state disrupts its own national sovereignty through the creation of exclaves (offshore detention centres) that defy traditional understandings of the moral, political and legal responsibilities of the sovereign nation (Coddington and Mountz 2014), and pushes sovereignty and external scrutiny further offshore and out of sight (Giannacopoulos and Loughnan 2019).…”

“…This paper focuses on the more than 1000 men who were detained at the Manus Island detention centre (hereafter referred to as the Centre) between 2013 and 2017. The facility was eventually closed in November 2017 due to a ruling by the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Supreme Court that declared the detention of asylum seekers in the Centre as 'unconstitutional' (Giannacopoulos and Loughnan 2019). As a result, the Australian Government announced the Centre would close on 31 October 2017 and all those currently detained there would be moved to purpose-built accommodation near the main town on the island, Lorengau.…”

Spectropolitics and Invisibility of the Migrant: On Images that Make People “Illegal”

“…57 While the centres in Papua New Guinea have been found to be illegal by the domestic Constitutional Court in the host country, 58 the removal of Australian personnel from the centres and opening their gates have not resulted in any legal progress for the majority of refugees detained there. 59 Spectropolitics, by removing the refugee from the picture and replacing her with a ghost, have performed the ultimate trick of creating the Agambenian homo sacer: 60 the subject so far outside the law that their existence is no longer ghostly in the image only, but also within and between the legal systems. 61 Invisible in domestic migration laws in the places where they are detained, not allowed to be recognised by the places willing to host them due to Australian control of their status, and barred from accessing legal processes allowing for their recognition in Australia where their only legal status is that of an illegal, the offshore detention centre detainees captured at sea during Operation Sovereign Borders are the ultimate ghosts paying the price of the spectropolitical play with invisibility.…”

Without love there can be law but no justice

“…Although it has been a while now since the legal machinery, by way of the Australian High Court overturned the foundational lie of terra nullius lying at the heart of the colonial sovereignty, Australia continues to function as though it is empty of Indigenous law and sovereignty. Indigenous lands are made and maintained as 'property' (see Davies, 2019) and the right to welcome refugees, for example, a right that should reside with the rightful owners of the land remains with the colonial sovereign (see Giannacopoulos & Loughnan, 2019) and is systematically denied to lethal effect (see Boochani, 2019;Tofighian, 2020). Under Australian law, prisons persist violently as a land clearing terra nullius technology (see Agozino, 2019;Palombo, 2019;Boochani, 2019;Tofighian, 2020).…”

“…The recent fatal police shooting of Warlpiri man Kumanjayi Walker at Yuendumu while in his own home and on his traditional country, once again demands an examination of ongoing colonial policing in Australia, a place that acts as though colonialism has ended (Giannacopoulos, 2019). The calls by the Yuendumu community for police to leave their country and their community is an abolitionist one (see Agozino, 2019;Palombo, 2019;Giannacopoulos & Loughnan, 2019) revealing once again that policing of Aboriginal communities is undertaken without consent and to lethal effect. There can be no doubt that such laws must be abolished or 'withered away' (Agozino, 2018) in practice as well as in legal and criminological knowledge systems.…”