AUSTRALIA: One Year on, Debate on Asylum Seekers Still Rages

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Kalinga Seneviratne

SYDNEY, Aug 27 2002 (IPS) - One year after a Norwegian freighter rescued asylum seekers and sent Australia’s refugee policy sailing into controversy, the government claims its tough stance is discouraging new arrivals — but critics say it is only hurting the country’s rights standing.

Monday marked the day the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, sailing off the Australian territory of Christmas Island, rescued some 428 people aboard a sinking Indonesian fishing boat.

Most of them, from Afghanistan and Iraq, were planning to seek political asylum in Australia.

But the Australian government refused to allow the ship enter its waters. It ordered the Navy to board the vessel and forcibly evict the asylum seekers, who were later taken to detention camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea under a policy that came to be known as the ‘Pacific Solution’.

As the Aug. 26 anniversary approached, supporters of Howard’s hardline refugee policy claimed victory by pointing out that asylum seekers arriving in leaky boats on Australia’s northern shores have all but dried up now.

Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock continues to defend the policy. “It enables us to assert the primacy of our right to determine who settles in Australia,” he told ABC Radio on Monday.

Also ahead of the anniversary, rights experts and activists issued new reports blasting Canberra’s policy of detaining asylum seekers, including children, as nothing short of inhuman.

Looking back, Dr Graham Thom, Amnesty International’s refugee coordinator, said: “What it (Tampa incident) did was politicise the whole debate and I think we stepped away from what are human rights, what is human dignity.”

“That debate has really been thrown out the window and it’s now become so political and it’s now about sovereignty and border protection” he added.

Amnesty itself issued a harsh report on Australia’s refugee policy on Monday, saying it has brought the country’s rights record to an all-time low.

But on the same day, Howard received an anniversary gift of sorts from a Thai judge who ruled that a 33-year-old Pakistani national, Hasan Ayoub, said to be a notorious people trafficker, must be extradited to Australia to face prosecution.

Australia claims that he is one of the key figures behind the people smuggling network that sends asylum seekers to the country.

The government also appeared to score another victory last week, when the high-profile ‘Afghan’ refugee Ali Bakhtiyari was reported to have told ‘The Age’ newspaper that he is in fact a Pakistani national – and had paid people smugglers to come to Australia.

In July, his two sons aged 12 and 14, currently held in the Woomera detention centre in the Central Australian desert, made world headlines when they escaped from Woomera and went to the British consulate in Melbourne to claim asylum.

Britain refused and they were taken back to the detention centre.

After Bakhtiyari’s revelation, Ruddock has threatened to cancel his temporary protection visa (TPV) and to deport him to Pakistan. He indicated that the government may review the cases of many others who have claimed Afghan citizenship and obtained refugee status here — some estimates put the number at 700.

Earlier this month, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights branded the policy of detention of asylum seekers as a “great human tragedy” and criticised the government for locking up children in an inhuman and degrading system.

The report was prepared by Justice Prafullachandra Bhagwati, a former Indian chief justice of India, who visited the Woomera detention camp in May and June. The Australian government branded the report “fundamentally flawed”, while human rights groups here praised it.

Earlier this month, Australia joined China, Cuba, Nigeria, Libya and Sudan in voting against a U.N. Convention on Torture, fearing that it will give the United Nations a blank cheque to scrutinise Australian jails.

In its report timed with the Tampa anniversary, Amnesty International pointed out that at least 1,834 asylum seekers, who were intercepted on Tampa and other boats that followed, are today dispersed across the South Pacific or in detention camps in Australia.

In taking this action against the asylum seekers, AI argues that the Australian government, in combating international people smugglers, should not punish those that these smugglers exploit.

Meantime, the debate on Australia’s policy on asylum seekers is far from finished. This week, refugee advocates signalled new challenges to the Howard government’s policy.

First, the law firm Maurice Blackburn Cashman is launching a test case on behalf of a Pakistani asylum seeker, who was handed a bill for 13,000 U.S. dollars for six months in detention.

The Howard government introduced additional laws recently to discourage asylum seekers from coming here, but refugee groups say this is designed to disqualify them from reapplying for asylum or for immigration to Australia at a later date.

Australian law provides that a person applying to enter the country must not have debts to the Australian government, so the ‘debt’ that the Pakistani asylum seeker has means he would not qualify for asylum or immigration to the country.

Second, activists are preparing a legal challenge to the temporary protection visa system, which they say allows the government to supposedly process asylum seekers’ cases but effectively leaves them with little rights.

Under this system, Woomera Lawyers Group’s Jeremy Moore argues, there are effectively two classes of Australian residents.

“People who are ordinary Australians and the other class, the lower class, the B class are people who are on Temporary Protection Visa,” he told ABC Radio. “They can’t leave the country, they can’t have any family reunion, they don’t know what is going to happen to them”.

Argued Moore: “No other country around the world does that.”