Human rights lawyers have moved to intervene in the High Court case of a man facing deportation to Nauru, arguing the government should be barred from deporting people to places where they face death or serious harm.
The appeal case concerns the plight of TXCM, an Iranian man who had his protection visa cancelled after he was convicted of murder and served 22 years in prison.
He is part of the so-called NZYQ cohort that was freed from immigration detention in the wake of a landmark High Court judgement that found it was illegal to indefinitely detain someone who has no reasonable prospect of being sent home.
About 350 people have been released into the community since the 2023 ruling, the bulk of whom have been convicted of crimes.
Earlier this year, the government struck a deal with Nauru, a tiny island nation in the Pacific, to resettle the cohort at a potential cost of about $2.5 billion over three decades.
The government is moving ahead with its plan to deport members of the so-called NZYQ cohort to Nauru. (AAP: Ben McKay)
The Human Rights Law Centre applied on Friday afternoon to appear in the matter as a “friend of the court” — meaning the lawyers would be asserting a legal principle rather than representing any one person.
They argue that the majority of the NZYQ cohort have serious medical conditions that cannot be adequately treated on the island and therefore that the Migration Act does not allow for their deportation.
Australia set to spend $2.5b sending 354 former detainees to Nauru
If the legal centre’s application succeeds, the lawyers say it could have implications for the entirety of the NZYQ cohort.
Human Rights Law Centre legal director Sanmati Verma — who is representing members of the NZYQ cohort but not TXCM — said she knew of a number of people in the group with physical disabilities.Â
“Most of the people facing deportation suffer from serious illnesses caused or exacerbated by indefinite detention. They cannot access medical care that is critical to their survival in Nauru,” she said
“These are the brutal realities that our government wants to ignore as it covertly exiles people for its own political expedience.”
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has previously told the ABC that he has personally inspected the accommodation and medical facilities on the island, describing the standard as “good”.
The court will now decide whether the organisation is granted leave to be heard.
First NZYQ member quietly deported
Earlier this week it emerged that the first member of the group had been quietly transferred to the island.
Mr Burke first revealed the plan to send the cohort to Nauru in February in a media conference in which he announced that three people, including TCXM, had been issued visas under an interim agreement.
Inside the fallout from the NZYQ saga
At the time he said he expected more visas to be issued once the initial legal challenges were cleared.
Since then, about a dozen more cohort members have been re-detained after being issued Nauruan visas.
Mr Burke defended the arrangement on ABC’s Insiders earlier this month, highlighting that members of the NZYQ cohort had no right to remain in Australia given their visas had been cancelled.
“Cancelling a visa has to have meaning,” he said.
“And until we landed this agreement with Nauru … we had a situation where for some people, no matter what laws they’d broken, cancelling a visa was meaningless.”
The minister has been contacted for comment.