Australia is locking up queer refugees on a remote Pacific island

Australia is locking up queer refugees on a remote Pacific island.

Twenty-eight-year-old Mohsen, who is bisexual and a Christian convert, fled his home in Iran after his uncle threatened to kill him. Mohsen was hoping to take shelter in Australia, but the boat smuggling him there was stopped at sea, BuzzFeed News’ J. Lester Feder and Soudeh Rad report. “Now he is trapped on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. He has twice been beaten by off-duty immigration officers in the past year and is now afraid to leave his room,” Feder and Rad write.

Mohsen is one of more than 1,300 asylum-seekers whom Australia has sent to what is called the Manus Island detention center — a facility for single men and teenage boys. About 1,300 miles to the east, on the island nation of Nauru, several hundred women and families are also being detained.

“Not only do refugees on Manus Island spend years in a horrific detention center, their asylum applications are processed in Papua New Guinea instead of Australia … This means that LGBT asylum-seekers are being forced to seek asylum in a country that criminalizes homosexuality, which human rights advocates say is a direct violation of prohibitions in international law against deporting people to places where they have a well-founded fear of persecution,” Feder and Rad write.

Manus Island is an island belonging to Papua New Guinea, more than 600 miles from the northern tip of Australia’s mainland.

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