NAURU FILES

The Nauru files contain the largest set of documents published from inside Australia’s immigration detention system. Leaked to The Guardian in 2016, they include nearly 2,000 incident reports from the Nauru detention centre, which were written by guards, caseworkers and teachers on the remote Pacific Island. 

Summary

Examples of events include assaults, injuries, abuse and other forms of violence reported at the detention centre between 2013 and 2015. As noted by The Guardian, as well as academic research, Australia has privatised its immigration detention centres and exported detention of asylum seekers offshore to places such as Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. This strategy is part of a wider “Pacific Solution” implemented by the Government of Australia since the early 2000s as a hardline deterrent to “stop the boats”. Effectively, asylum seekers intercepted and detained on Nauru are removed from access to Australia’s asylum system.

Data Structure

These data are composed of incident reports. An incident report is a short summary of an event in the Nauru detention centre written by staff there. Some of the details found in the files may be triggering; we therefore advise caution with reading and analysing these data. According to The Guardian, these reports form part of the Government of Australia’s requirements to document what is happening within its detention system. Each report holds detailed information of the incident at the detention centre along with a “summary log”. Working with The Guardian, we have organised these data into two forms: a PDF of each incident report, sorted by name at the time of leak, and a CSV/XLS of all incident reports, which structures key details into variables within its columns. Examples of variables include time, incident type, severity and description. Combined, these form a structured database linking each incident report to these variables.

Data Source

The Guardian has modified the original, leaked data to remove any personally-identifying information within them. To achieve this, a stringent approach of redaction has been implemented to remove names of asylum seekers and staff, personal identification numbers of asylum seekers, signatures of detention staff, nationalities within small population groups and residential tent numbers, among other things.

There are also a large number of acronyms used in these data. For your convenience, we have provided a TXT document with a listing of these acronyms and their meanings.