 Hello, my name is Ismael Huzain. I'm one of the refugees locked up at Pac prison for over two years now after being medevaced from Pavniugini, which I was held over seven years and another two years here so I've been in Australia detention for nine years and I've been brought here for medical reasons and good not treatment and still locked up here When you've been treated badly even worse than criminals We've been held a place that have no sunlight at all, no fresh air and we have to spend at least 23 hours a day in a single room which have no windows and there's no light in the tunnel. We don't know how long more we will be kept and how long more it will take and that's the worst torture that someone can get We lost our minds here. We've been sick both physically and mentally The food that we have provided is mold food. We have nuggets. Sometimes it's not even edible and very poor treatment, worse than criminals I'm standing outside the Park Hotel in Melbourne. This is a hotel that's been used as an immigration detention facility for the last couple years and there's currently about 30 men being held there for about nine years in total. If you look up in the window there's also a sign that says where is the humanity. Those are the windows where the the refugees are being held. If you look on the road right behind me you can see there are some messages that have been left here by activists and these messages appear on the streets quite frequently by activists who are trying to draw attention to the issue and keep the focus on these refugees who are in detention. You can see on the wall itself it's been freshly scrubbed. Whoever is running this facility is very quick to cover them up or wash them away after they've been put on the walls or on the streets in front of the hotel. This used to be the hotel entrance and you can see it's been completely blockaded. Looks also like there's been something thrown at the glass and there's been cleaned off. The building, the Park Hotel, is just down the streets from the conversation offices. We're about one block that way behind me. The other direction is the Melbourne CBD. We're right in the middle of the city. This hotel was in the news when Novak Djokovic was in Australia for the Australian Open and his visa was revoked. He was brought here to immigration detention and so there was a great huge global spotlight on this hotel at that time and as a result on the plight of the refugees who were being held here which quickly dissipated when Djokovic left the country. The first asylum seekers to try and reach protection and safety in Australia by boat came in the 1970s as a result of the Indo-Chinese refugee crisis and that was really a particular time in history. There were significant numbers at that time of people coming by boat but there were also people that Australia was resettling as refugees out of the region from Vietnam and elsewhere but since then there have been successive waves of other asylum seekers coming by boat from really a range of places all around the world from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, more recently from Syria as well as from other parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. So the people who are locked up in hotels in Australia today actually first arrived here about eight or nine years ago most of them would have arrived in the second half of 2013 or early 2014. Unfortunately for them at that time Australia was trying to look tough on immigration by sending asylum seekers who arrived by boat offshore to the Pacific Island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. By late 2014 Australia had pivoted away from this policy and stopped sending people offshore but the group who were already there at that time got stuck detained in harsh conditions for years while processing was dragged out. Now many went on to be recognised as refugees but Australia insisted that they would not be permitted to return here on a permanent basis so they remain stuck in limbo for years on end. They were locked up many in hotels and a number of them have now been there for many years. The reason for detaining them in hotels is particularly unclear and extraordinary given that hotels are not fit for purpose for detaining people for long periods of time. That's something we saw really clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic and the hotel quarantine phase how difficult it was for people to be held in closed confines in hotels. What we have seen here is many years worth of being held in detention in hotels often crammed in together with many other people. Recently the Australian Border Force confirmed that none of the people who were detained at the moment have security concerns raised about them by Australia's security agencies. There's been some vague insinuation that there might be character concerns but the suggestion that someone might have a character concern without putting that evidence to them or giving them a chance to rebut it is not really a basis for indefinite detention. The vast majority of them have been found to be refugees so they have been through the full formal legal process. If we think through the journey that these people have been through they have faced torture trauma persecution they might have had loved ones very close to them be killed. They've had to leave behind their homes and their families fled in difficult conditions. When they finally reached Australia they were met with detention and then deportation to another country where many of them lived in incredibly difficult circumstances for many years again still in detention. The question becomes what next? Well the first step should be release from detention and certainly any individual for whom there is not an active security risk or concern should be released immediately onto a bridging visa. Where can they go to settle to start rebuilding their lives and to find a durable solution to their refugee condition? What we don't know is why they are still locked up.