YAREN – Lawyers for a 23-year-old Tamil asylum seeker say they are appalled at the way she was treated when she was brought to Australia for medical help after attempting suicide on Nauru.

“Ruth” told the ABC that after she learned she would never be resettled in Australia, where her husband is currently on a bridging visa, she lost all hope and wanted to end her life.

“If such a thing as hell exists it would be very similar to Nauru – I can’t live here,” she said.

After her suicide attempt, she was medically evacuated to Brisbane, while her son was kept on Nauru with her brother.

It took her husband “Michael” three days to find out where she had been taken to.

Ruth and Michael have requested pseudonyms be used, as their asylum cases are still being determined.

When Michael eventually found where she was being treated, he went immediately to visit her, the first time they had seen each other for nearly three years when he left Sri Lanka on a separate people-smuggling boat.

“I didn’t see the same person I left three years ago,” he said. “She had over 18 cuts in many parts of her body. I don’t know why she is doing this, but I can see she is suffering a lot.”

They had three days together, with Ruth crying much of the time.

Last Thursday, Ruth was due to have a private phone call with her Melbourne-based lawyer, but two security guards refused to leave the room or take the phone off speaker-phone, saying she was on suicide watch and needed to be monitored.

“They said they couldn’t even stand on the other side of a glass window and monitor her from there,” said her lawyer, Daniel Webb of the Human Rights Law Centre.

“I couldn’t give her confidential legal advice so the visit had to end.”

The Immigration Department subsequently apologised that a private conversation had not been permitted, and said arrangements would be made for a private phone call the next day.

The phone call never happened. That night Ruth said goodbye to her husband at 9:30pm, then said she was given sleeping tablets by a mental health nurse to help her sleep.

The next morning she was woken at 5.00am and told she was being immediately deported back to Nauru.

“My body was very weak and I couldn’t resist,” she said.

“I was crying and then I asked them whether I could speak to my husband and tell him I will be taken to Nauru. They refused.”

When her husband arrived for his scheduled visit at 9.00am, he was told she was already on the plane.

Webb said he did not know why his client was removed so quickly.

“What I know is that at 5.00pm on Thursday evening the department said this woman was too suicidal to be left alone with her husband and with her lawyer on the phone,” he said.

“Only a few hours later she’d been whisked away to the very place where she had attempted to take her own life just a few days before.

“The department has either shown contempt for her right to confidential legal advice or it’s shown contempt for her health and wellbeing. Either scenario is unacceptable.”

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton declined to be interviewed on her case but his spokesman said in a statement: “The transferee was given notice of her return to Nauru and at no time during the transfer did she request to contact her lawyer or husband.”

“We have been advised by the Department that all standard practices were adhered to in this case.”

Michael said despite the government’s policy that no-one arriving by boat would be given asylum in Australia, he still held out hope that one day he would be reunited with Ruth and their son, who he has not seen since the boy was three days old.

“I’m very worried about my wife. I want my wife to be with me,” he said.