Thirty-one Australian women and children forcibly held for four years in a Syrian detention camp have told the federal government to prove it cannot bring them home, or “bring their bodies to the court” in Australia.
In filings before the federal court, Save the Children Australia—representing 11 Australian women and their 20 children—has argued the Australians are being unlawfully detained and their government has the power, and an obligation, to remove them and repatriate them to Australia.
The Australians are the wives, widows, and children of slain or jailed Islamic State fighters: Most have been held in the squalid Roj detention camp in northeast Syria for four years. None have been charged with a crime or currently faces a warrant for arrest. Several of the children were born in the camp and know no life outside it. Conditions are “dire,” the Red Cross says, illness and malnutrition is rife, and the security situation “extremely volatile.”
The Australian government has argued, in its filings to court, that it “does not have control of the remaining Australian women and children” and cannot be compelled to repatriate them.
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