Iran has scotched a proposed deal to forcibly return Iranian asylum seekers from Australia and from offshore detention.

The Iranian foreign affairs minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said in Canberra on Tuesday that Iran would not accept any of its citizens being repatriated against their will.

“We cannot force anybody to come back to Iran but if anybody wants to come back voluntarily, we always take our citizens with pride,” he said.



Previously, the Australian foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, had flagged an agreement that would allow Australia to forcibly repatriate asylum seekers, on the condition Tehran guaranteed they would not face persecution or punishment.



Australia wants to forcibly return asylum seekers who are found not to require protection under the Refugees Convention or Australia’s complementary protection regime.

There are about 9,000 Iranian asylum seekers in Australia or in offshore detention. However, many of those are still waiting for their refugee status to be determined, some after more than four years in Australia.

Historically, most Iranians seeking asylum in Australia are ultimately granted the right to stay because of a “well-founded fear” of persecution in their homeland; 87% of Iranian asylum seekers arriving by plane, and 65.2% of boats arrivals, were granted protection, latest government data shows.



But several hundred whose asylum claims have been rejected are stuck in limbo in Australia, unable to be deported and without any apparent prospect of being granted the right to stay.



Several asylum seekers have been voluntarily returned from Australia and from offshore detention facilities, but returns to Iran remain problematic.

Returned asylum seekers are questioned, often for several hours, at Tehran airport, and sources in Iran suggest they are regularly put under long-term surveillance and face ongoing persecution from authorities.



Two Iranian asylum seekers previously held in the Manus Island detention centre have been left stranded – detained in Port Moresby for nearly eight months – after agreeing to be returned to Iran.



Iran has, so far, refused to accept the two men’s return.

The two men – whom The Guardian has chosen to identify only by their first names – say they have agreed to be returned, but have been left stranded in detention in the PNG.

Both men have been issued with identity numbers which identify them as Iranian citizens and would normally allow them to be granted passports.



However, they have been told there is a “problem” with their applications, and the Iranian embassy has not issued new documents.

“I signed the form for returning to Iran seven and a half months ago. I wrote, ‘Come back,’ ” 41-year-old Abdi told The Guardian from Port Moresby. “I am destroyed man; I am shattered. We are in limbo here. I am suffering, but we are stuck.”

Both men are understood to be suffering serious physical and mental illnesses, sustained while in detention on Manus.



Sources in Tehran have told The Guardian their ongoing health conditions – which will require long-term and expensive treatment – are understood to be the basis of the impasse between Australia, PNG and Iran.

The money the men will be paid for their repatriation is considered to be insufficient to cover their ongoing health needs.

Abdi said he was chronically ill, and would require long-term care. He said his family visits doctors in Tehran, and he explains his symptoms over the phone and is then diagnosed.

“I take so many psychiatric tablets, but the pain still remains in my nerves, in my eyes and my intestine,” Abdi said. “It is like a tragic movie.”

Another of the asylum seekers, Ali, said he felt he had been abandoned. He has been on PNG since August 2013, nearly 950 days.

“No one calls us, no one care about us, no one. We are forgotten.”

Ian Rintoul, from the Refugee Action Coalition, said the fact that Australia could not even engineer a voluntary repatriation of asylum seekers demonstrated the impossibility of forcing Iran to accept its citizens being returned against their will.

“For Australia to push for forcible returns to this country is completely unseemly,” he said. “There are grave and systematic human rights abuses occurring in Iran that are far more important and pressing for Australia to raise.”

Zarif’s visit to Australia – and discussion of a proposed asylum deal – is part of a broader push from Tehran to improve its economic and diplomatic relations with the west after last year’s nuclear deal and the lifting of sanctions in January.



But serious concerns remain over widespread human rights abuses, which include public hangings, stonings, amputations, and gouging out of eyes as punishments.

Iran executed at least 966 people in 2015, the United Nations says, the highest number in a decade. The country also executed children, an act, “strictly and unequivocally prohibited under international law”.

The Australia director at Human Rights Watch, Elaine Pearson, warned Australia must proceed carefully in any deal with Iran.

“In the rush to welcome Tehran in from the cold, Australia should not trample over the rights of vulnerable Iranians,” she said.

Pearson said that recognised refugees on Manus had reported being offered up to $10,000 to return to Iran: “You would have to question the voluntariness of that return given these people have been detained for years on Manus, and the fact that $10,000 is a lot of money.”

The National Council of Resistance of Iran – a Paris-based a group of exiled Iranian opposition political organisations – expressed “deep abhorrence” over Australia’s proposed asylum deal, calling it “collusion with the religious fascism ruling Iran”. The council argued Australia should not “victimise the sacred right of asylum for petty and short-term economic gains”.



“The velayat-e faqih [clerical rule] system – which the Australian government so audaciously tramples human values to deal with – has turned Iran into a prison for all Iranian people, especially women,” it said. “Acid attacks, flogging, stoning, gouging out of eyes, amputation of limbs, and piling up students, political and civil activists, intellectuals, lawyers and artists in its medieval prisons are but a part of the regime’s infamous record.”

