All remaining refugee and asylum seekers detained at the Park Hotel in Carlton in Melbourne’s inner suburbs will be released.
Eight men were released onxjmtzyw Thursday from the makeshift detention centre after they were medically evacuated to Melbourne from Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
Some have been detained by Australia for nine years.
Three people from the Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation centre in the northern suburbs and six people detained in Brisbane were also released.
Refugee Mehdi Ali spent nine years in Australia’s detention system after arriving by boat with his cousin Adnan Choopani in 2013.
He spent his final years of detention at the Park Hotel.
Mehdi celebrated the news on Twitter from his new home in the US, where he resettled a month ago as part of the US agreement to take some refugees from Australian-run detention on Manus Island and Nauru, struck with Barack Obama in 2016.
Kurdish refugee Mostafa “Moz” Azimitabar was released from the Park Hotel last January after eight years detained by Australia.
“These hotels should never again be used to detain us,” he wrote on Twitter.
The Park Hotel was exposed as a makeshift detention centre earlier this year when Serbian tennis champion Novak Djokovic was detained there before being deported.
