Last modified on Fri 18 Dec 2020 14.02 EST
The jungle north-east of Christmas Island’s immigration detention centre is dark and unforgiving. A person, seeking refuge or release, can disappear from sight in just a few steps.
The terrain runs steeply downhill to the nearby roiling sea. Jagged basalt rock, slippery and sharp, marks the descent. Treacherous country at any time of day.
But how a refugee under Australia’s protection came to be there, running weakened, staggering and disoriented through that jungle on a dark November night, is a four-year saga of punitive indifference, bureaucratic dishonesty and, finally, fatal incompetence.
Fazel Chegeni was already a vulnerable man when he arrived in Australia seeking the most basic of recognition as a human being. Stateless all his life, marginalised in every place he’d been, he had been beaten, tortured and left to die in a desert before he sought asylum in Australia.