The Australia Federal Police has dropped charges against seven former immigration detainees for breaching their ankle monitoring or curfew orders.
Officers withdrew the charges in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday following a High Court ruling two days earlier which ruled that the surveillance and curfew requirements imposed on 224 illegal immigrant criminals ordered released by the same court earlier this year were unconstitutional.
Magistrate Belinda Franjic on Friday ruled the AFP should bear the costs of striking out the charges against non-citizen criminals Abdelmoez Mohamed Elawad, Deng Joseph Cinwel, Lominja Friday Yokoju, Saad Kasem Eltaena, Angelo Zakaria Chol, Naimatullah Safdar Ali and Nestor Rodriguez, The Australian reported.
Elawad, a Sudanese-born Bedouin career criminal, has been convicted 18 times on more than 208 charges, including for weapons possession and violent assaults, while Cinwel, from South Sudan, also has a long and violent criminal record.
On Wednesday the High Court ruled that curfew and ankle monitoring requirements imposed on a former immigration detainee from Eritrea known as YBFZ were unjustifiable and punitive.
YBFZ arrived in Australia as a “stateless” refugee in 2002 and was jailed after being convicted of serious offences between 2006 and 2017. He was put in immigration detention after completing his prison sentence in 2018 and had his application for a protection visa refused in 2020.
Then late last year he was released after the High Court found so-called indefinite detention was unlawful, and was ordered to wear an ankle monitor and abide by a curfew.
In June this year he was charged with six offences for failing to comply with both conditions – four relating to monitoring and two to alleged curfew breaches.
The High Court in November 2023 ruled on convicted Rohingya Muslim paedophile NYZQ, who raped a 10-year-old boy, and as a result the Labor government has since freed 224 other detainees who authorities claimed could not be deported.
The resulting outrage led to preventative detention laws being passed through parliament allowing any illegal immigrant criminals released from indefinite detention to be held for three years if it is decided they might be a danger to the community, and the ankle monitoring and curfew conditions which have since been struck down.
