A FORMER detainee and a doctor in Australia’s offshore immigration prisons have warned the British government not to recreate the same “humanitarian, financial and medical disaster.”

The warning came as MPs prepared to vote this week on the Nationality and Borders Bill, which includes a provision to allow asylum-seekers to be sent offshore while their claims are processed. 

Speaking at a webinar in the run-up to the debate, Iranian artist and refugee Elahe Zivardar, who was imprisoned for six years in an Australian-run detention centre on the South Pacific island of Nauru, warned that such sites were “designed to be places of torture, humiliation, cruelty and racism.”

“[They are] intended to drive innocent people, including hundreds of children and women, to either go back to the countries they came from or risk death and disease,” she said. 

“My main message to the UK, as someone who has experienced it first hand, is to stand against … the border industrial complex.”

Also speaking at the webinar, hosted by Detention Action, was Dr Nick Martin, a GP and British army veteran who spent nine months working as a senior medical officer in the Nauru detention centre.

Describing the situation on the island as “worse than a war zone,” he said: “We had this resignation syndrome which became endemic in the population of children.

“I’ve no doubt we’ve created a whole cohort of people who will suffer for the rest of their lives. That’s what the UK will have as well.”

Requests for asylum-seekers to be transferred to Australia for medical treatment were routinely denied, he said, resulting in “horrific situations” where women who had become pregnant after being raped by guards were refused a termination. 

“You can’t let a politician override a doctor. I would beg the UK and politicians not to recreate the disaster, the humanitarian, financial, medical disaster, that was wholly avoidable.”

Dr Martin said that the majority of the asylum-seekers ended up settling in Australia anyway, having spent years languishing in detention. 

Lawyer Madeline Gleeson, a senior research fellow at the University of New South Wales’s Kaldor centre for international refugee law, urged British ministers not to go down the “same problematic path we did.” 

She added that even though the policy had cost Australia billions of dollars, it did not succeed in deterring asylum-seekers from arriving by sea. 

Campaigners are pressing MPs to back an amendment to the Bill that would remove the offshoring provision. 

The change has been backed by cross-party politicians, including Tory rebels Caroline Nokes, a former immigration minister, David Davis and Andrew Mitchell. 

Canberra opened offshore detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea in 2001 in a bid to deter asylum-seekers from trying to reach Australia by boat.