Doctors should boycott working in Australia’s immigration centres and must continue to speak out on mistreatment of detainees—despite the law

In 1992 Paul Keating’s Labor government of Australia introduced a controversial policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers to help cope with rising numbers of Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cambodian refugees. In 2001 John Howard’s Liberal government introduced the “Pacific solution,” which involved excising some islands from the mainland so that they no longer constituted Australian soil and transferred some asylum seekers, who had arrived by boat, to detention centres on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru and later also on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.1 Some asylum seekers have been sent to detention centres on the mainland. The average time spent in detention before applications for refugee status are processed has lengthened progressively and is now well over a year.2