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ifty-seven people from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq now held at the Immigration Detention Office in Jimbaran, Badung regency, are waiting in limbo for the UN to decide their fates.

Three Afghan families, including eight children, were moved last week to Jimbaran from the immigration detention office in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, due to overcrowding, an official said Monday.

“Fourteen Afghanistan migrants were moved last Wednesday by the International Organization on Migration [IOM] because the detention center there was overcrowded,” said I Made Widiantara, acting head of the Jimbaran detention office.

The Kupang detention center can only hold 60 people while the number of its detainees had quadrupled, he said.

The Jimbaran office is currently detaining 57 asylum seekers — 25 Iraqis, 18 Iranians and 14 Afghans — and can hold 90 people, he added.

The migrants, who were all alleged to be seeking asylum in Australia, were captured in separate incidents in Maumere, Makassar and Kupang and have received support from the IOM.

Widiantara said it was unclear how long the asylum seekers would remain in detention since they were still waiting for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to decide on their status, which will determine if the 57 should be returned to their countries of origin or brought to a third country.

“We’re still waiting for the UNHCR to collect data about them. It is that body’s authority to change their status from ‘asylum seekers’ to ‘refugees’,” he said.

If they are declared ‘refugees’ the UN might move them to a third country, he said.

Widiantara said the detainees have been under stress and some have shown unusual behavior.

Eleven year-old Ihsan, from Iraq, said that he did not understand why he and the others had been detained for the last three months.

“We wanted to go to Australia, but they caught us,” he said.

“We have been here for three months. We can’t go out. We can’t play. We can’t go to supermarket.”

The boy said he didn’t want to return to his home country, adding that “it is a bad country, expensive, and doesn’t have water”.

Australia has accepted only 25,000 asylum seekers in the last 34 years, as previously reported.

Australia has two approaches for asylum seekers: the Pacific Solution and the Indonesian Solution. Under the former, which was initiated by the Howard government in 2001, Australian asylum seekers were detained in Nauru, a small Pacific island nation. Under latter, initiated by the Rudd government in 2009, has been alleged, asylum seekers are detained by Indonesia.

The UNHCR reported that 43.3 million people globally were forcibly displaced at the end of 2009, the highest number of people uprooted by conflict and persecution recorded since the mid-1990s.

The 2009 UN body’s Global Trends report said that the number of refugees voluntarily returning to their home countries has fallen to its lowest level in 20 years.