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Two years after he walked free from Sydney's Villawood detention center, Mohsen Sultany should be enjoying his freedom. But the 34-year-old, who fled Iran to avoid persecution for his political beliefs and is now studying surveying and writing poetry, has frequent nightmares and panic attacks; the verse he writes is always dark. He has been recognized as a refugee by the Australian government, but he can't shake free of the four years he spent in detention fighting for that recognition, or forget the attempted suicides, mental illness and mistreatment he saw there. He still becomes upset when he talks of the friends he left behind. "They have to wait without any future," he says, "If you can't even write your name in English, how can you fight for your rights in the courts of Australia?" Instituted by a Labor government in the early 1990s, Australia's policy of detaining all who arrive on its shores illegally has been continued by the conservative government of John Howard since it first won office in 1996. It's a policy as controversial as it is implacable - and it has seldom stirred more debate than since the revelation on Feb. 4 that a mentally ill Australian woman, Cornelia Rau, had been held for four months at South Australia's remote Baxter detention center after claiming to be an illegal immigrant from Germany. Among Australia's long-term detainees are those who have been denied refugee status; some, like Kashmiri Peter Qasim, who has been held for nearly seven years because India will not accept him without any identification papers, could spend the rest of their lives in detention.

Others who have spent years in limbo are still awaiting a decision, and Time has been told that for many of these people, Australia's system for processing visa claims is not moving quickly enough. It's claimed cases are so hampered by delays, challenged decisions and inadequate legal advice that some people who are eventually deemed genuine refugees wait in detention, often with damaging pyschological results, for years. Recently released on a temporary protection visa, Farhad doesn't want to give his real name for fear that he might jeopardize his chances of being allowed to live in Australia permanently. But when the 31-year-old Iranian was stopped nearly five years ago with 120 other people in a boat heading for Australia, he says the rough reception from officials convinced him that he'd fled into a situation as intolerable as the one he'd left. Certain he was about to be deported, Farhad feared that if he told immigration staff about his clandestine pro-democracy activities, they might send the information back with him to Iran. "So I kept the story of my life short. I decided it was best to be silent."

When his bid for refugee status was rejected after the initial interview, Farhad appealed to the Refugee Review Tribunal, where he gave more details of his background. But immigration lawyers say applicants who appear to add new elements to their story at this stage are immediately under suspicion - Farhard was rejected there, too, and says the refugee review tribunal member hearing his case accused him of lying. What followed was a long legal fight over the tribunal's decision not to accept a letter he had received after his hearing from a senior Iranian cleric who supported Farhad's claim that he'd been a dissident. When Farhad was first put into detention, he thought it would be "two or three months and then I could be released to be a good community member for Australia." It would be four and a half years before his case was finally decided. South Australian lawyer Claire O'Connor says the Baxter detainees she represents routinely wait more than a year for court judgments, of which they may have several. The troubles of one 21-year-old Afghani who won his case late last year after four years locked up is, she says, typical: "He can't sleep, he can't eat, he has panic attacks and depression - and all because of detention. What I cannot understand is that 87% of people who arrive by boat are eventually released on visas, and yet many of those are spending years in detention." Despite repeated requests, Federal Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone chose not to speak to Time. The story of another Iranian asylum seeker, referred to as P in documents before the Federal Court last week, shows how delays can quickly multiply. Now entering his fifth year in detention, P has seen his case passed between several lawyers, partly because he has been transferred between detention centers, but also because lawyers working pro bono are often swamped with cases. Around the time of his transfer, some original documents went astray while being passed between two refugee support groups. P appealed to the Federal Court against the tribunal's finding that he was not a refugee. By the time his case came up, however, P had no lawyer, was on medication for depression, and had no idea the hearing was imminent. It was only by chance that Lorna Thompson, an Australian woman who had taken an interest in his case, learned that the appeal was days away. Calling everyone she knew, she managed to find him a lawyer at the last minute. P lost that appeal, and is now waiting for a date for his appeal to the High Court. He has tried to kill himself twice, and wound up in hospital before Christmas after joining a hunger strike. Lawyers for P and two other Baxter detainees are now arguing in court that he needs urgent psychiatric treatment.

Last year, the review tribunal took an average of 106 days to rule on detainee cases. But longer delays often come from backlogs in the courts, to which asylum seekers can turn for judicial review of a tribunal decision. "There is just delay after delay," says Nick Poynder, a Sydney-based barrister who specializes in immigration law. The Federal Court, the Federal Magistrates Court and the High Court resolved 2,221 appeals in 2003-04; 163 cases were sent back to the tribunal for reconsideration. But the rules for launching an appeal are narrow. Immigration lawyer Nick McNally, of Sydney firm Parish Patience, says this makes the tribunal incredibly powerful. "The problem is that a lot of asylum seekers are unrepresented or ill advised in those early stages," says McNally, "and by the time they come to lawyers - when they go to the federal court, for example - the opportunity to prove certain facts is over."

Refugee advocates and lawyers claim that some members of the tribunal - who are appointed by the Immigration Minister - are biased. They say the quality of interpreting services is poor and that the tribunal often uses inaccurate information about conditions in the countries from which asylum seekers come. As well, the lack of guidelines on how to assess applicants' credibility increases the incidence of inconsistent and arbitrary decisions, says David Manne, coordinator of Melbourne's Refugee & Immigration Legal Centre: "The system is in desperate need of guidelines." One former tribunal member, who did not seek reappointment after several terms, says colleagues reacted differently to the government's role in their reappointment: "You can choose to say, as I did, Well, I just have to do my job and if I don't get reappointed, that's fine. But there may be other people who want to keep their job." Members often felt under pressure to meet productivity targets, but she says she never saw evidence of bias: "A great proportion of the time you do have an independent decision-maker."

Migration agents are contracted to prepare applications for refugee status through the federal government's Immigration Advice & Application Assistance Scheme (iaaas). But funding for the scheme is "woefully inadequate," says one migration agent who has been involved in iaaas work. This is particularly true, he says, when it involves working with people in remote detention centers: "The time constraints placed on contractors are so tight … to the point where one becomes extremely concerned about whether or not you can fully and properly represent that person." Nick Poynder says that when he did iaaas work in 1999, the tender allowed for half a day to interview the asylum seeker and prepare the case and another half day for the hearing. The migration agent, who asked not to be named, confirms that this remains the norm. Such pressures may help explain the complaints often heard among asylum seekers about the quality of the advice they get from migration agents. The former review tribunal member says she often saw agents concocting evidence and inserting it into their client's claim, sometimes without the knowledge of an illiterate or non-English-speaking asylum seeker. Refugee advocates say that sloppy advice and in some cases neglect continue to hurt asylum seekers' chances. One detainee now entering his sixth year at Baxter was assured by his migration agent that she would submit key evidence to the tribunal before a decision on his case was made. When a friend rang to check on the case, she was told that the agent had failed to file the evidence and was no longer with the firm. The tribunal rejected the man's claim; he is now waiting in detention for a court appeal. "We hear about them all the time," says Ngareta Rossell, a Sydney-based refugee advocate who has extensive contacts within detention centers. "Many asylum seekers feel they have been taken for a big ride."

Concerns about the quality of agents are being addressed through a compulsory examination introduced just over a year ago, says David Mawson, ceo of the Migration Institute of Australia, a division of which registers migration agents. Complaints against 2% of the 3,300 agents nationwide are upheld each year. "The visa applicant may or may not tell the migration agent everything, and the agents themselves may in some circumstances embellish what they are told," says Mawson. Sometimes, he says, people don't tell their stories in full because they don't trust the migration agent. If an asylum seeker's application is rejected, there is no government funding for appeals to the courts. Applicants must find a lawyer themselves - in most cases, one who is willing to take their case pro bono. For someone in a detention center whose English is poor, this tends to be a haphazard process, says Nick Poynder: "It's just luck." Barrister Claire O'Connor says she's not allowed to visit an unrepresented detainee unless she has a written invitation from them. But she can visit prisons, "where anyone can come and ask for my help." Without legal advice, an asylum seeker has little chance of succeeding in an appeal, says immigration lawyer Nick McNally: "There are a whole range of issues which are very complex legally, and it's a minefield even for lawyers."

Instead, the task of helping detainees regularly falls to the volunteers who make up a mushrooming support network. These people often become not only a detainee's only regular link with the outside world but their de facto case managers, investigators and lobbyists. Many spend hours every week finding everything from lawyers to medical advice, tracking down evidence to support asylum seekers' claims and lobbying for action on languishing cases. When lawyers are too busy to visit clients, or too far from remote detention centers, advocates frequently make the trip instead. "We do the legwork," says advocate Rossell. When Farhad's court appeal was being prepared, Bernadette Wauchope, of Port Pirie, South Australia, and another volunteer from Byron Bay, on the north coast of New South Wales, spent more than 130 hours collecting evidence that would eventually verify his claims. "The people who succeed are those who have Australian people going in there and helping them untangle the mess," says Rossell.

Without the volunteers, says migration agent and advocate Naleya Everson, "there are a lot of people who would not have got out" of detention. But when the detainees' hopes rest so heavily on non-professionals, most of them with little training, or on lawyers trying to fit cases in around their daily jobs, the danger is that "mistakes are inevitable," says lawyer O'Connor. That can hardly be reassuring to those among the nearly 900 men, women and children in detention who are still waiting for a decision on their future.

• Lisa Clausen
• For illegal immigrants whose claims to refugee status are rejected, taking their case through Australia's courts can be an agonizingly long and haphazard process