UN human rights experts have asked the Australian government to return 46 of its citizens from detention camps in Syria, expressing “deep concern” that women and children live in appalling conditions there.
In a joint letter released Sunday, 10 UN special rapporteurs said bringing the group of 30 children, some as young as two, to Australia was “the only legal and humanitarian response” to the situation.
United Nations experts described the situation in the Al-Hol and Roj camps as “worrisome and unhappy” in terms of Australian citizens detained on suspicion of their former ties to the Islamic State. “It is possible that some of the women were forcibly transferred to Syria or became victims of human trafficking,” the investigators write.
They added that the gravity of the situation could not justify Canberra’s inaction on the “total loss of rights of Australian citizens as a result of their arbitrary deprivation of liberty”.
Kamal al-Dabousi, from Sydney, whose daughter Maryam and her three children are being held at Camp Roj, said the UN experts’ report “reiterates and confirms what we have been saying to the government over the years.” He said the messages the detainees’ families receive from their relatives in the Syrian camps are “heartbreaking.” Dabusi added that families had heard about children in the camps suffering from malnutrition and feared for them, explaining that “the situation is terrible, affecting the physical and psychological health” of children and their mothers, and that the Australian government “for political purposes continues to risk the lives of women and children” without returning them to their homes.
In turn, Australian Foreign Minister Maris Payne said that the government is discussing this issue, but refused to disclose information about the return of these citizens from Syria or the nature of concerns about their safety. She told national broadcaster ABC that the children were “Australians who were in this situation because their parents had gone to war zones.”
In response to the experts’ letter, Australia’s UN representative Amanda Gorelli said that the return of these detainees from Syria is being considered on a case-by-case basis, noting that Canberra has returned all of its unaccompanied minors from Syria. in 2019.
She said the Australian government has long believed that its human rights obligations do not include conditions in the camps in northeast Syria.
