A Palestinian refugee has been kept in solitary confinement for nearly seven months on an island 2,100 miles north of Sydney at a cost of £1.8m, the Australian government admitted yesterday.
Since last July, Aladdin Sisalem has been the sole inmate of the Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea. The detention centre is part of Australia's policy to process refugees offshore, the "Pacific solution".
The cost of keeping the centre open is £300,000 a month. The immigration department says that £90,000 of that is spent directly on Mr Sisalem, with most of the rest paying for upkeep of the camp. Keeping a detainee in Australia's domestic detention centres costs around £2,000 a month.
A month ago, detainees in another camp on the Pacific island of Nauru ended a five-week hunger strike in protest at their situation.
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