This was published 9 months ago
Sixth ex-immigration detainee appears in court after High Court ruling
By Lachlan Abbott, Lisa Visentin and Alex Crowe
An ex-immigration detainee arrested after emergency legislation was enacted following last month’s High Court decision has been accused of breaching his visa conditions by travelling across Melbourne outside his curfew.
Temesgen Tsegay Gebreyonas is the sixth former prisoner to allegedly break the law since a political furore erupted over the court ruling and the federal government’s response.
The 36-year-old Eritrean-born man was arrested late on Friday in Melbourne’s west, after being released from detention on November 23. Gebreyonas appeared via video link from the downstairs holding cell in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Saturday evening. There was no application for bail and he was remanded in custody to next appear before a Melbourne court on December 18.
Australian Federal Police first visited Gebreyonas at his residence on December 1 after receiving an alert the ankle monitor he is required to wear as part of his release conditions appeared to have a flat battery, according to the court’s statement of facts.
Police say Gebreyonas informed them he didn’t understand how to charge the monitor and he was fitted with a new one.
Police allege the monitor alerted them Gebreyonas was not at his residence the following Friday and he could not be contacted via phone despite multiple attempts from officers.
After having his permanent residency cancelled in Australia on character grounds in 2017, Gebreyonas has been in detention since March, 2018, when he was detained by the Australian Border Force as an unlawful non-citizen following his release from the Ravenhall Correctional Centre, documents tended to the court say.
Gebreyonas was charged under amendments to the Migration Act that Labor and the Coalition teamed up to pass last month. They require former detainees to wear ankle bracelets and abide by strict curfews, regardless of whether they had criminal convictions.
The curfew breach carries a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment and a $93,900 fine.
Further amendments were passed in a fiery late-night session of parliament on Wednesday. This included establishing a new preventative detention regime which allows the immigration minister to seek a court order to re-detain in prison serious offenders who are believed to pose an unacceptable risk to the community.
The federal government has so far declined to outline how many released detainees it intends to seek detention orders for and how soon this process will occur.
Pressed on this at a press conference in Sydney on Saturday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he would not pre-empt the court processes.
“The whole point of the legislation was to establish a process whereby courts will make those decisions and we will not risk any legal consequences,” he said.
“I make this point, the High Court made the decision. We had to respond to what was the law because governments should not break the law.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told parliament this week he was sorry any time someone was the victim of a crime.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
The opposition has hammered the government over its response to the High Court decision on November 8 that ruled indefinite immigration detention was illegal, accusing it of being flat-footed and failing to have appropriate safeguards in place.
Since the court’s verdict, the government has released almost 150 people – including some who already served sentences for violent offending – with the political furore intensifying at the start of the week when news first broke that an ex-detainee was re-arrested.
Late Sunday, Afghan refugee and convicted sex offender Aliyawar Yawari fronted court in South Australia after allegedly indecently assaulting a woman on Saturday night at an Adelaide hotel. A second ex-detainee, 45-year-old Mohammed Ali Nadari, was accused of drug possession when police allegedly found him with cannabis in western Sydney last Saturday afternoon.
A third, Abdelmoez Mohamed Elawad, 45, appeared at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Thursday on charges of stealing luggage from an airport traveller. A fourth, Emran Dad, 33, was arrested in Dandenong for allegedly breaching his reporting obligations as a sex offender.
The fifth detainee was arrested in Queensland on Thursday on an outstanding warrant seeking to return him to prison in NSW for breaching parole conditions over an earlier conviction for assault.
The government defended its handling of the cases by pointing to the stronger laws passed by parliament on Wednesday to allow the preventative detention of former detainees who could pose a threat to the community, as well as the use of community supervision orders and monitoring devices such as ankle bracelets.
In documentation accompanying the release of the amendment, the government acknowledged its legislation could breach human rights relating to discrimination, given Australian citizens who have been convicted of similar offences are not subject to similar restrictions.
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