CAIRNS, Australia – Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian refugee and writer who documented abuses under Australia’s harsh immigration policies during his one-year detention on a remote Pacific island, received asylum in New Zealand.
Mr. Boochani has spent the past few months in Christchurch, where he applied for refugee status after receiving a temporary visa to attend a writers’ festival last November.
On Thursday, which was also Mr. Boochani’s 37th birthday, and exactly seven years since he was first detained on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, he received official notification that his one-year work visa application in New Zealand it had been successful.
Mr. Boochani said he planned to apply for permanent residency, which is a path to citizenship. “It is like the end of a chapter in my life,” he said, adding that his news was bittersweet because he feared for those still detained by Australian authorities.
Under strict Australian government policies for those trying to reach the country by boat, thousands of people, many from the Middle East and Africa, have been detained indefinitely in Manus and the island nation of Nauru. “Politics exists, and so it is really difficult to fully enjoy it,” he said.
Mr. Boochani said that the vast differences in the way the Australian and New Zealand authorities had treated him revealed a gulf in his leadership on human rights.
“We ask people in the international community to look at this country, to look at Australia and what they have done and what they are doing,” he said, adding that he hoped that other detainees would also be given asylum. “They must free them.”
Boochani, who previously worked as a journalist for the magazine in Kurdish Werya, fled Iran in 2013 after police arrested several of his colleagues and raided his office. He spent a few months in Indonesia before trying to travel to Australia by ship, but was intercepted by the Australian Navy and sent to Manus Island.
There, he documented human rights abuses against himself and others, raising awareness of the miserable conditions and deteriorating mental health of the men he lived with, many of whom had fled persecution in their home countries.
Mr. Boochani’s social media posts, detailing detainees’ self-harm and suicides, as well as inadequate access to medical care, helped expose policies that had been largely hidden by extremely limited access to camps for journalists and activists.
In early 2019, Mr. Boochani received Australia’s highest-paid literary award for his book “No Friend but the Mountains,” which was written entirely through WhatsApp. It further detailed abuses in the camps, cementing it as a voice for those who had been largely silenced by Australia’s strict policies. He was unable to attend the award ceremony due to his arrest.
In November, he received a visitor visa to New Zealand to attend the WORD Literary Festival in Christchurch. He has been living there ever since, working as a researcher at the University of Canterbury.
