Australia’s use of hotels for immigration detention found to have ‘devastating’ health effects

At the time of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s inspections, the longest continuous detention in a hotel was 634 days

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The Australian government’s use of city hotels as ad hoc immigration detention centres – including confining people for nearly two years – has “devastating impacts on people’s mental and physical health”, the Australian Human Rights Commission has found.

In a report published on Wednesday morning, the commission argued that the use of hotels to incarcerate people remained a “regularised” part of Australia’s immigration infrastructure, rather than a measure of last resort, even though the number of people detained – and the length of their detention – has steadily decreased.

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