Manus Island detainees 'free to come and go' from centre

Transcript

The Ministry of Immigration in Papua New Guinea says all asylum seekers detained on Manus Island are now free to come and go from the processing centre.

About 900 asylum seekers who were refused entry to Australia were detained on the Island but the PNG Supreme Court has ruled their detention is illegal.

Ben Robinson reports.

Papua New Guinea's Deputy Chief Migration Officer Esther Gaegaming said in a statement that the Immigration Ministry is complying with the orders of the Supreme Court to cease detention.

"All residents of the Manus Regional Processing centre are free to come and go. All have been encouraged to relocate to the East Lorengau Refugee Transit Centre."

The transit centre 20 kilometres from the processing centre, but the Member of Parliament for Manus Island, Ronny Knight, says he doesn't want more asylum seekers in Lorengau town.

"In the transit camp at Larengau they've been involved in home brew production and drinking, illicit behaviour, they've been breaking into houses trying to get girls out of the houses. The media doesn't know this but there's been a couple of times when the locals have given some of them a good hiding. Now all of them are allowed to roam around the place we don't know what's going to happen next."

The Kurdish / Iranian asylum seeker and journalist, Behrouz Bouchani, says most of the Processing centre's roughly 900 residents do not want to leave.

He says they're afraid of being forced to settle in PNG and are waiting for further court action that could return them to Australia.

"They took us by force to here and they want to settle us here by force. This is a kind of modern slavery and there is not any reason that we go to East Lorengau and they take us from there and this is a risk.  We want to stay here and wait for the court order and we don't want to live in PNG, in Manus, because this country is unsafe."

The Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has ruled out returning Manus Island asylum seekers to Australia but Ronny Knight says they can't stay on Manus.

"There's no jobs available for them, there's no land, it's all customary land. It will just not work for them to be assimilated into the community. The idea was for them to be processed on Manus and then passed on to other communities on the mainland like Port Moseby and Lae, the main cities where there is government land and there are jobs available for these types of people. That has not eventuated."

PNG's Immigration Minister could not be reached for comment.