By AVA TURNQUEST

Tribune Chief Reporter

aturnquest@tribunemedia.net

HELD for years without charge at the Carmichael Road Detention Centre, refugees yesterday described the facility as a prison that operated with no regard for human rights, international conventions, or the law.

“If you stay in one place and you have no rights, how do you feel?” asked one refugee yesterday as he explained that “you feel like a piece of stone, like an animal, you have no rights. To whom can you say something if nobody hearing you?”

“I was suffering inside, there (was) too much stress, I almost get depressed. Sometimes I had to go to the doctor to get pills for the depression. I don’t like to get too much pills, but sometimes I had to do.”

The refugees, who were released last month, recounted a demoralising experience of subsisting with inadequate food, hygiene and housing while struggling to understand their status with no clear explanation of their fate.

The allegations raise serious questions about the regulatory framework, or lack thereof, guiding operations at the Carmichael Road Detention Centre (CRDC), specifically as it relates to the medical treatment and mental health of detainees.

“In the three years I’ve been there,” one refugee said, “they don’t give me no toothbrush, no toothpaste, no deodorant, and the soap you have to almost have to fight with them to give it to you. The last time they gave soap before I left, one of the immigration ladies she came with a bag of soap and she said with the words ‘these are not for Cubans.’

The refugee continued: “In any place you can find good people and bad people. The majority of (officers) when you ask something to them as simple as that it’s like you’re talking to the wall.

“Every country have their own culture and laws, but if they want to charge me with something they have to talk to me since the beginning and explain what’s going on, not keep me so long like that because I have family too. My family don’t know nothing about me, my family is suffering that too.”

The Tribune was asked not to identify the refugees by legal counsel due to the sensitive nature of their resettlement.

An Eritrean man and three Cuban men, who petitioned the courts over the lawfulness of their detention, were released on July 13.

Their times ranged from two years, to up to four years and four months in the case of the Eritrean.

In separate cases, the men claimed that they were never questioned by immigration officers during processing, and highlighted their refugee status with the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR).

The Bahamas acceded to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and its 1967 Protocol, in 1993.

In one case, a refugee said he was not formally processed until there was a change in management at the facility and he was questioned concerning his status.

The refugee said he often begged for deportation in desperation to be free from the facility.

“Every day only sleep, wake up, and sit down that’s it. No TV, no nothing, no (books) nothing. They don’t allow anything even newspapers they don’t allow. So sleep, wake up, sit down, talk with someone, your friends that’s finish.

“Sometimes I say even if I go back (to my home country) it’s better for me. Even if I go back there I was thinking it’s better because they lock me here and don’t tell me anything.”

After his second year in detention, the refugee said he began to agitate to be formally charged and sent to the Bahamas Department of Correctional Services.

“I see they take someone to Fox Hill prison, he get two years and serve 18 months and come back, and I’m still in here. So I say even if I go and they say five years, ten years, you do your time and be finished. Somebody in the detention centre now for eight years and he’s still there.”

The refugee added: “So when I see all that I say better that they give me time and let me finish the time. It’s prison (at CRDC) because you can’t do anything, you can’t come outside.”

“It’s jail,” another refugee said, “it’s the same like jail because they take us to Fox Hill. I see the same thing how they count us is how they count in jail. If you stay for long maybe you will get the bed to sleep, but if you first come you have to be sleeping on the floor until when they deport plenty Haitians or plenty Cubans.”

The men were represented by Martin Lundy, of Callenders & Co.