Every room in this hotel is booked. But the guests are not allowed to leave.
Every day, the men unfurl large pleas for help over the balcony railings of their hotel room and stand in silence as traffic roars along the main road of the Australian city they're trapped in.
Their signs are mostly made from bin bags stuck together with tape, and secured to the railing with shoelaces.
"Where is justice?" one reads.
These men are not hotel guests, but refugees and asylum seekers who have been in Australian immigration custody for seven years. Many arrived in Australian waters in 2013, after the government introduced offshore immigration processing. They were detained on the remote islands of Manus in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and on Nauru in the Pacific, in conditions once described by the United Nations as "harsh" and "inadequate." In 2016, Amnesty International called Nauru an "open-air prison."
All are suffering the effects of prolonged, indefinite detention and were brought to Australia last year for urgent medical treatment.
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