“An excellent and well-researched article about Australia’s punitive and unlawful asylum policies. Well worth a read.”
Australia
claims that its refugee policies are consistent with human rights
standards, but a closer examination reveals that a secretive, abusive
system is at work.
On June 26, President Trump tweeted that “much can be learned”
from Australia’s refugee policies. Other leaders, including Italy’s Matteo
Salvini and The Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, have also expressed admiration for
Australia’s deterrence-based refugee policies. The numbers are convincing. In
the seven years before the Liberal government’s Operation Sovereign Borders
took effect, approximately 50,000 asylum seekers sought to enter Australia by
boat and approximately 1,100 died at sea. Since Sovereign Borders, only two
boats have reached mainland Australia, and there have been no known deaths at
sea. So, is President Trump right? Does Australia provide the answer for
countries wishing to deter asylum seekers, who risk their lives and the lives
of their children to reach safer shores?
Australia says that asylum seekers are welcome by the front door
but not the back. Operation Sovereign Borders, the highly politicized,
catch-all name attached to Australian border policy, ensures it. Operation
Sovereign Borders is actually a package of legislation, featuring bills
introduced by lawmakers from across the political spectrum. Most notably, it
mandates that boats be turned back, and that asylum seekers undergo mandatory
offshore detention until those who receive refugee status can be relocated to a
third country and those who do not can be sent back home. Asylum seekers
arriving by boat are met at sea by the Australian Border Force Unit, which
streams video interviews of the asylum seekers back to mainland border
officials who attempt to determine whether the migrants are technically
refugees. If the officials conducting the interviews determine the arrivals are
in fact genuine refugees, the boat is brought to a processing center — which,
importantly, is not on Australian soil. Australia has opened multiple offshore
processing centers in nearby territories as well as countries like Papua New
Guinea and Nauru.
If none of the asylum seekers are found to be genuine refugees,
the boats are turned back. And the Border Force Unit has turned back every boat
it has come across in the past two years, suggesting that there has not been a
single genuine refugee among the asylum seekers arriving by sea in that time.
Amnesty International, which has been highly critical of Australia’s refugee
policy, notes that few asylum seekers fleeing by boat will have the documentation
they need to prove their case while at sea, and reports that there have been
multiple accounts of poor connectivity in the video links.
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Abrogating Responsibility
Under international law, though, it is not an option for
Australia to assist asylum seekers arriving on its borders — it is an
obligation. Australia, like most other countries, is a party to the 1951 U.N.
Refugee Convention, its Protocol, and multiple other human rights treaties.
Australia also has a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, and is one of five
countries making up the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. These
international treaties and the multilateral institutions they emanate from seek
to protect refugees from arbitrary detention, refoulement — repatriation
to a country where refugees could be in danger of persecution — and physical
and psychological torture.
In an interview with the HPR, Josh Watkins, a professor of
global studies at the National University of Singapore who specializes in
borders and border security, noted: “From the advent of the Pacific Solution in
2001, through its reincarnation in Operation Sovereign Borders, Australia’s
asylum seeker policies have been condemned by UNHCR, Amnesty International, and
scores of other commentators as being unnecessarily draconian.”
Erika Feller, assistant high commissioner to the UNHCR from 2006
to 2013 and a professor of government at Melbourne University, expressed that
concern in an interview with the HPR. She explained that Australia’s deterrence-based
asylum seeker policy “flies in the face of international treaties. Deterrence
is not a mechanism that is envisaged in the 1951 Refugee Convention and it runs
counter to it.”
Even after ratifying international non-refoulement agreements,
Australia has turned boats back to countries where their passengers might face
harm, such as Sri Lanka and Vietnam, where asylum seekers have been arrested,
interrogated, tortured, and jailed. Many of the other Asia-Pacific transit
countries which receive these turnbacks are not party to refugee and human
rights treaties and do not have the legal or financial capacity to protect
asylum seekers. As a consequence, asylum seekers find themselves in regions
where they have no rights and may face persecution and imprisonment. Meanwhile,
the Australian government does not document the asylum seekers sent away in
these boat turnbacks; as a result, it remains impossible to hold Australia
accountable for the plight of those refugees who are persecuted upon return to
their home countries.
Australia’s system of mandatory and indefinite detention
blatantly violates its obligations to protect asylum seekers. Australia has
been condemned by a working group of the U.N.’s Human Rights Council for 51
counts of illegally holding refugees in indefinite detention, some for as long
as nine years. The average length of arbitrary detention for a refugee who
arrived in Australia by boat was 511 days. Australia’s policy of holding
refugees in indefinite detention breaks international human rights law, taints
its international standing, and undermines its credibility when denouncing
other nations for the same crimes.
In an interview with the HPR, Mary Crock, a professor of
law at the University of Sydney and the author of nine books on refugees, noted
that “from the time mandatory detention became law in 1992 there was increased
dissonance between Australia’s international legal obligations and our domestic
law and practice … Our relationship with international human rights law became
increasingly fractured and problematic.”
Refugees have undergone significant human rights abuses in
Australia’s offshore detention centers. Human rights organizations report the
absence of physical liberty, medical attention, and proper security on Manus
and Nauru islands. Twelve men have died while in detention — one of them
immolated himself during a U.N. monitoring visit. Since the Australian election
in May, there have also been at least 26 cases of self-harm or attempted
suicide on Nauru and Manus — in desperation, asylum seekers have cut
themselves, gone on hunger strikes, swallowed rocks, and even sown their own
lips shut. These cases were not recorded by any Australian institution until
Monash University created a database of border-related deaths in 2010. To this
day, no government authority collects any information on asylum seekers who
have died while attempting to enter Australia, while in detention, or shortly
after their release.
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