After years spent ‘less than human’ in overseas detention, Australians share their stories of returning home

Sean Turnell was standing in a Myanmar hotel when he was approached by more than a dozen armed police.

The Sydney economist had been working as an adviser to the country’s democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

His world changed dramatically when the Burmese military launched a coup in February 2021.

Within days, Ms Suu Kyi had been arrested along with several other ministers, and Professor Turnell was trying to get a flight out of the country.

His arrest in the hotel reception would be the start of 650 days of imprisonment, charged with violating the official state secrets act, an accusation he has denied.

The trial was closed to Australian officials and to the media.

At times during his detainment, he was kept in solitary confinement, dealing with vermin, intense heat, and repeated interrogation.

“There was an article written in the Wall Street Journal about why Americans love peanut butter, and to illustrate it they had a jar of Skippy peanut butter.

“And it was exactly that Skippy peanut butter that was sent to me in the prison, and it just brought a flood of memories back.

“It’s a funny sort of thing, and I don’t think it ever goes away.”

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Ultimately the Australian government secured his release, with Myanmar’s junta announcing he and three other prisoners would be released as an act of “goodwill”.

He was reunited with his wife, Macquarie University’s Dr Ha Vu, who had campaigned repeatedly for his release, in November 2022.

“I actually said to my wife just the other day that I hadn’t had a dream for a long time, for a few months, and then I had one the other night,” he said.

“I can’t remember what it was, [just] that I was trying to get out, being re-sentenced or something like that.

“I think my philosophy, and I’m not sure what the psychiatric profession would make of it, but for me it’s pretty much just move on and don’t dwell on it.

“I suppose [in my case] the basic revenge is to bring people’s attention to the situation there.”

How the Australian government responds to cases of wrongful detention — like that of Professor Turnell — is currently the subject of a Senate inquiry.

The inquiry, established in June, is being led by the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Reference Committee.

Professor Turnell said he welcomed the inquiry.

“Given the complexities of the issue, given that it’s only going to get worse through time, I think it was time for something like a Senate inquiry to say, ‘Well, look, what do we know?'” he said.

“I think thinking outside the box around all these issues, about different mechanisms, is exactly what’s necessary [and] hopefully that’s what this inquiry will bring out.”

Lack of ‘clear process’ for overseas detainees

At any given time, there are an unknown number of Australians facing imprisonment abroad, according to the Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance (AWADA).

The group says these people are either being held by foreign governments or have been kidnapped by “armed groups, terrorist organisations or other non-state actors”.

“The number is unknown because there is no legal definition of wrongful detention in Australia,” it writes in its inquiry submission, penned by Kylie Moore-Gilbert.

It adds the lack of a definition makes it even harder to know which cases are based on genuine criminal activity, and which are motivated by other factors, “or even simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

“Australia does not currently have a policy framework in place specifically for managing wrongful detention, nor does it have a strategy for managing, responding to, and deterring cases of hostage diplomacy.”

Hostage diplomacy, according to human rights group Amnesty International, is the practice of arbitrarily detaining a citizen of another country “for diplomatic leverage”.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade [DFAT] has labelled the practice “unacceptable”.

The department said it adopted a tailored approach to each individual case of international detention.

While they say the “flexible” approach has enabled several high-profile and multiple less well-known releases in recent years, the lack of a standard practice has been criticised.

Human Rights Watch’s Australia director Daniela Gavshon told the committee the lack of a system to identify cases was a “major barrier” to getting detainees the support they needed.

“In the first instance they’re treated as ordinary consular cases, and then, even if a case of wrongful detention is identified, there’s no clear process that this then activates,” she said.

“In countries like the US … having a specific high-level person responsible for these cases of hostage diplomacy has had a positive impact.

“It would help in securing the release, in strategising and in communications and collaborations with families, and this same official would then also be able to assist with rehabilitation and repatriation.”

‘I’m just somebody that was in the wrong place at the wrong time’ 

For 84 days after he was arrested on drug smuggling charges in Thailand, Luke Cook was kept in solitary confinement for 24 hours a day.

The Perth father had been arrested along with his wife while at the airport in Bangkok in December 2017, accused of attempting to smuggle crystal methamphetamine into Australia via Thailand several years earlier.

The trial lasted 11 months. Five days after his conviction, he was placed on death row in Bang Kwang Central Prison.

During his imprisonment, he said he was denied access to basic essentials such as soap and toothpaste, to his case files, to his family and to medical treatment for months at a time.

Kept in maximum security, he said he was made to wear 12-kilogram leg chains for “24 hours a day for periods as long as 40 days”.

By 2020, Mr Cook was facing his last chance — one last appeal to the Supreme Court of Thailand.

It was at this point that the Capital Punishment Justice Project (CPJP), a group which fights against the death penalty, got involved.

They submitted their “deep concerns” about the case to the court.

In September 2021, according to CPJP, the court found the convictions had been obtained via “unreliable evidence”.

After almost four years in prison, Mr Cook was exonerated and immediately released.

“I didn’t believe I was coming home until I’d left Thai airspace, even when I was on that plane,” he said.

“I was just waiting for something to go wrong because I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

“You haven’t read a newspaper, haven’t had a telephone call in four years, and then everybody is like, ‘Okay, he’s home now. He’s good.'”

With his freedom came a new hurdle — readjusting to a society and a life he had long believed he would never have again.

“My nine-year-old son, who I remembered as a five-year-old, was doing quarantine with me and he didn’t recognise his dad,” he said.

“I was really in survival mode, not in a parenting mode. We’ve really had to work on that relationship and rebuild it, and then he had a lot of PTSD and a lot of abandonment issues.”

Mr Cook said he had felt abandoned by government officials after being exonerated, adding he believed authorities had “put walls in the way” following his release.

“When I applied for a passport to take my son to go and see his mother for the first time in nearly five years, they denied my application because I owed $5,000 for a prisoner loan,” he said.

“[That was] vitamins and medicine and food that they had bought me while I was incarcerated. So I had to pay them $1,000 and set up a payment plan, which I’m still paying $100 a month for.”

Rebuilding himself and raising his son became a motivator for Mr Cook.

“It was [things like] standing in a shopping mall and not being hypersensitive, not worrying about the person behind me stabbing me or jumping me,” he said.

“I spent two years of being very, very angry at the people that had put me there because I didn’t deserve to be there and I hadn’t done anything to these people.

“A lot of anger. A lot of bad energy. I’ve done a lot of reading, I read the Bible, I read the Koran, I read about Buddha. I read about everything and put a collective together of all this ancient knowledge … I was just asking questions, why are we here, where do we come from?

“And the main thing, part of it, was that forgiveness. It’s not for the person you’re forgiving, it’s for yourself.

“Otherwise, your mind is so busy with plotting the revenge of the justification and … the other side of that was to find peace and acceptance in squalor, in terrible, terrible conditions.

“I’m grateful for … the tools that I managed to gather through such an extraordinary and stressful time and [it] turned me into a very loving and caring person.

“If you asked me, would I change it? Absolutely not, because I’m a far better person today than I was, than the person that was locked in a cage.

“What I am, that’s by choice, and the main choice was that I’m not a victim. I was just somebody that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

More support needed for detainees and their families, say experts

Working with families and offering support for detainees after their return to Australia has been stressed as a key issue by multiple agencies.

Among those was journalist Cheng Lei, who was freed after being arrested in China in August 2020.

Ms Lei was working as a broadcast journalist for Chinese state-owned media when she was accused of “supplying state secrets overseas”.

She was released and returned to Australia in October 2023.

She called for better coordination between state and federal officials to support detainees and their families.

“In my case, my children had to live with my mother, a pensioner in her 70s with hoarding disorder in a house with serious health hazards that only got worse in the three years I was gone,” she said in her submission to the inquiry.

“I shudder to think what might have happened, considering 9 out of 10 fire fatalities occur in hoarders’ households.”

Detainees and their families, she said, should also be introduced to others who have experienced “similar suffering”, and be given “access to advice from past detainees about the pros and cons of media advocacy”.

Other agencies have also told the inquiry giving families support to launch their own public campaigns could also be helpful.

Human Rights Watch’s Ms Gavshon told the public hearing: “We don’t suggest the government should be going public in every situation.

“It seems that the default is no publicity, and then, if it gets really pushed or, ultimately, the families push for it, it happens.”

‘The impact of this on my life has been devastating and it’s still ongoing’ 

Professor Turnell and Mr Cook have both shared their stories, alongside other survivors of overseas detention, in submissions to the ongoing Senate inquiry.

The inquiry has so far conducted two public hearings and received dozens of submissions from human rights organisations, families, researchers and others.

It is scheduled to hand down its final report by November 28.

Dr Moore-Gilbert was among those testifying to the committee during a public hearing on Friday.

In 2018, she was lining up to board her flight home from Iran when she was picked out of the queue.

She had been invited to Tehran to attend an academic conference — she had been to multiple Middle Eastern countries previously and didn’t expect any issues.

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At the airport, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards accused her of being an Israeli spy.

On Friday, she told the inquiry: “I spent two years and three months wrongfully detained in Iran between 2018 and 2020.

“I received a 10-year prison sentence and was ultimately traded by the Australian government in a prisoner swap deal for three convicted [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] terrorists.

“The impact of this on my life has been devastating and it’s still ongoing.

“I lost my marriage, I lost my career, my relationships with members of my family have perhaps been irrevocably damaged as a result.

“And in many ways it’s harder now than it was when I was first released.

“I’ve come to realise I’ll never be able to claw back my career to the point that it was at before my arrest in 2018 and after dedicating so much of my life to that it’s difficult to accept.

“I did not have a close family network and spent most of my first year post release alone in my house during lockdown.”

She said her anger about her ordeal had motivated her to campaign for reform.

She said the lack of a definition of wrongful detention and a distinct process to handle such cases left many Australians to fall through the cracks.

In her testimony, she highlighted a number of potential strategies, including sanctions on foreign hostage takers, and the establishing of a separate body solely devoted to handling overseas detainees.

“Instituting a senior expert role, subject to diplomatic rotation … does not reduce flexibility,” she told the committee.

“They could be provided with a full suite of flexible tools to tackle this phenomenon, to be used in accordance with their own discretion and expertise.

“Most importantly, it needs to be a very senior person appointed for a fixed period of time, that is not subject to diplomatic rotation and has that very, very high level access to the prime minister.”

She also urged the committee to speak to Australians currently detained overseas during future public hearings.

“It’s important to remember that some of our fellow citizens are facing this injustice right now,” she said.

“They could be being tortured right now as we speak, and are relying on us to bring them home and bring their suffering to an end.”