Nauru: Australia's Guantamo Bay?

In 2013, Australia's government announced a tough new policy towards refugees travelling by boat to its shores. The campaign that went with it was called, 'No way. You will not make Australia home'. Its goal was to discourage asylum seekers from entering the country 'illegally' - as the government saw it. Most were coming from countries such as Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Many refugees - having fled their homes - considered themselves stateless. Their journeys were arduous and complex. Those from Iran, for instance, would travel first to Malaysia, where they could enter without a visa. Then they'd make their way to southernmost Indonesia, and from there they took boats towards Australia's closest islands. The trips typically involved people smugglers and dangerous - sometimes deadly - journeys on boats that were often overloaded and unseaworthy. Of the boats intercepted at sea by the Australian Border Force, many were forcibly turned back to where they'd come from. But passengers on some - and all those who did make it into Australian waters - were taken into custody, then deported, flown to neighbouring countries. There, in Nauru and on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island, they are still held in what Australia's government calls 'regional processing centres'. Nauru is a tiny 29 square kilometre island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That small independent country - a member of the United Nations - has played a central role in the history of Australia's refugee policies. Nauru's 'detention centre' first opened in 2001, under a policy brought in by Australia's conservative Liberal Party - the so-called 'Pacific Solution'. But this all changed when Kevin Rudd, from the centre-left Labour party, came to power in 2007. Rudd closed Nauru's centre and most of the refugees were relocated to Australia. But then as the number of asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat started going back up, the Labour Party's government wa