ASYLUM SEEKERS AND
HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
Wednesday 31 December 2014
IN REALITY THE POLICIES BY LABOR AND THE ABBOTT GOVERNMENT ON ASYLUM
SEEKERS ARE A PACK OF LIES GLOSSED AS HUMANITARIAN BY SAYING THEY'RE
SAVING LIVES. THEY JUST USE ARTFUL RHETORIC TO HIDE THEIR CRIMES ON HUMANITY
‘Have the boats stopped reaching Australia?’ is the wrong question to
ask. A better one by which to judge the success of its policies is
this: are more people safer? Or fewer?
A comic produced by Australia aimed at deterring asylum seekers. Photograph: customs.gov.au
The boats have not stopped. They have stopped reaching Australia but
people are still drowning in seas in our region and across the world.
More than 350,000 asylum seekers boarded boats in 2014, the UN has found, leaving their homeland to seek protection somewhere else. Of those, 54,000 people boarded a boat in south-east Asia – Australia’s “neighbourhood”, in the words of the foreign minister.
At least 540 people died on boat journeys in that neighbourhood –
starved, dehydrated or beaten to a death by a crew member and thrown
overboard – or drowned when their unseaworthy vessel sank.
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The great majority of those travelling in Australia’s region were Rohingya, a persecuted ethnic minority from Burma, who are brutalised by their own government,
denied any rights to citizenship, to education, banned from having more
than two children and from work in certain industries. Regularly,
Rohingya villages are torched and their occupants forced into remote tarpaulin camps, where malnutrition and disease are rife.
Australia has signed an agreement with Burma with the aim of “boosting Myanmar’s immigration and border control” – essentially to prevent Rohingya from leaving.
In 2014 Australia stopped 441 asylum seekers in 10 vessels, the UN says, forcing them back to the countries they last departed.
The government regards these figures as evidence its policies are
working. Thanks to boat turnbacks, offshore processing and regional
resettlement, the argument goes, boats are no longer able to reach
Australia. The people smugglers no longer have a product to sell: the
“sugar is off the table”.
But that view fails to look over the horizon. It ignores – because
Australia knows they are there – all the unseaworthy boats, and their
desperate passengers, still looking for a safe port to land or dying in
the seas to our north.
Even allowing (almost certainly over-generously) that several times
that figure of 441 were deterred from trying to come to Australia, this
country’s boat arrivals remain a tiny fraction of the world’s figure.
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The
number of people in our region still boarding boats bound for somewhere
else is demonstration of the irrelevancy of the “stopping the boats”
shibboleth. It is not a statement of policy, it is a tool of political
rhetoric.
“Have the boats stopped reaching Australia?” is the wrong question to
ask. A better question by which to judge the success of Australia’s
asylum policies is this: are more people safer? Or fewer?
Has the sum of protection for people who need it – against sectarian
violence, against ethnic discrimination or political oppression, against
arbitrary detention in a transit or destination country – increased as a
result of Australian policies?
The answer is no. There is less protection in the world for people who need it as a result of Australia’s policies.
Australia voluntarily ratified (in fact helped draft)
the UN refugee convention. It willingly accepted the treaty’s
obligation to offer protection to those who need it. But Australia’s
policies now consistently place it in breach of that convention.
In announcing the Burma
partnership, the then immigration minister, Scott Morrison, proclaimed:
“Assisting our regional partners in building stronger, more effective
borders is a priority of the Coalition government.”
But Australia is neglecting this obligation. Australia’s regional neighbours, its “partners” in addressing the asylum issue, are more overwhelmed than ever.
Malaysia has 41,000 registered “persons of concern” and thousands
more unknown. Australia and Indonesia are locked in a long-running spat
over boat towbacks and Australia has announced it will not resettle any
more refugees from Indonesia.
It is, instead, looking to move refugees with claims for protection
in Australia to third countries: Papua New Guinea, Nauru and Cambodia.
Australia’s concern, it seems, ends at the edge of its territorial
waters.
Two year-end speeches have highlighted the growing divergence between
Australia and the rest of the world on the issue of asylum.
In Geneva, the UN high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres,
urged countries to work more cooperatively to address the issue of
irregular migration. He said dealing with the number of displaced people
could never be as simple as stopping boats and shutting borders.
“Focusing only on border control and deterrence will not solve the
problem,” he said. “It is the duty of any government to ensure security
and to manage immigration but these policies must be designed in a way
that human lives do not end up becoming collateral damage … an exclusive
focus on security and targeting criminal activity only risks making
these journeys even more dangerous.”
Australia has a different attitude – a different world view – on
asylum. In a speech barely reported (it was given the same day as the
government’s temporary protection legislation was being debated by the
Senate), the head of the immigration department, Michael Pezzullo, said
border protection, along with military power and diplomacy, formed the
“trinity of state power” essential to any country’s existence.
While recognising it was “beyond the capacity of any one country … to
tackle the global problem of refugee flows and numbers”, he emphasised
that Australia must, alone, “control our maritime approaches”.
“The ocean around us is the crown jewel of our border protection
system, and we must do everything reasonable within law, resources and
government policy to ensure that this remains the case.”
Given the long-running antagonism with Australia’s most significant
neighbour over boat towbacks, the actions of his department reinforce
this emphasis on the unilateral over the cooperative.
Pezzullo’s speech
was largely a dissertation on the continued primacy of sovereignty even
in an increasingly interconnected, globalised world. It also made
broader allusion to the new secretary’s view of the role of immigration
in Australia’s development, and the country’s future population. He
suggested Australia had enough people.
“When we transition from our current state to the new department next
year, and commence on the path of the next phase of our journey, we
should take a moment to reflect on what has been achieved since 1945. I
contend that we will be able to declare the original mission of 1945 –
to build the population base – to have been accomplished.”
It is a significant departure from the tone of his long-serving predecessor, Andrew Metcalfe,
who urged a continued drive to populate Australia. “Our job as a
department is to help build our modern Australian nation ... we have
been extremely well-served by our migration programs,” he said.
“Economically, our migration program has been, and continues to be, a
backbone to many of our industries. People migrate to succeed, not to
fail.”
Ordered migration and seeking asylum are separate issues, and should
not be conflated, but Australia cannot fail to recognise more people are
moving now than at almost any time in history. There are more displaced
people in the world – 51.2 million
– than at any time since the second world war: continued conflict,
discordant economic opportunities, climate change – all will force more
people to move, and more often.
As the world urges closer cooperation on the issue of mass and
irregular migrations, Australia grows ever more isolationist. Moving the
problem over the horizon is not the same as addressing it. The boats
have not stopped.
Resurgent Taliban targets Afghan Hazara as Australia sends them back
In Afghanistan, more and more Hazara are preparing to flee a
resurgent Taliban, just as Australia has started returning Hazara asylum
seekers. Another is being deported on Wednesday
Juma, a Hazara man, standing on his ancestral lands. In the background
is the mountains where his daughter froze to death while they hid from
the Taliban in a 1998 attack. Photograph: Abdul Karim Hekmat for the
Guardian
It was midnight in Ghor when the Taliban appeared on the road in the headlights of the minivans, waving at the vehicles to stop.
There were 20 men on the road, carrying Kalashnikovs. Nearby stood a truck, stopped earlier by the same men, now fully ablaze.
The Taliban boarded the buses and ordered everybody off.
By the light of the burning vehicle they checked everyone’s face against the ID they carried.
The 13 Hazara – easily distinguished by their facial features – were
roughly moved into a separate line. They were marched away into the
darkness and shot.
The victims had been travelling to Kabul for Eid, to celebrate the
end of Ramadan with their families. Among the dead was a child and a
couple married only a few days earlier, travelling to their honeymoon.
Fatima’s husband died in the darkness on the side of the road that
night. “Life is very hard after I lost my husband … the night is night
but the day is also like night for me,” she tells Guardian Australia
from her home in Kabul. She wipes tears from her eyes with the hem of
her chador.
Hazara woman Fatima, whose husband
was killed by Taliban insurgents in a roadside attack this year. Her
family has been left destitute by his death. Photograph: Abdul Karim Hekmat for the Guardian
“What was his crime to be killed that way? He was just bringing some food to the table for his children.”
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Fatima and her six children have been left destitute following her husband’s death.
She cannot afford to send them to school. Her 12-year-old son finds work on the streets to feed the family.
“My heart aches when I look at other fathers who cuddle their
children on the street. I hear them call ‘daddy’. But my children don’t
have a father. I have a little four-year-old boy who used to hang on his
father’s shoulder all the time. He always asks me ‘where is my
father?’”
Afghanistan, which for generations has known only the brutal, grinding waste of war, is as dangerous as it has ever been.
Over 13 years the presence of hundreds of thousands of foreign soldiers brought no peace to a benighted land.
And their withdrawal has left a power vacuum that is being filled by whomever is most brutal and most ruthless.
Afghanistan’s ethnic and religious minorities, such as the Hazara of the country’s central plains, again face persecution.
“Hazara are being killed because of their ethnicity right across the
country,” Mohammad Musa Mahmoudi, executive director of Afghanistan
Independent Human Rights says. “It has happened several times.”
The enmity is ancient, and runs deep. Hazara are Shia muslims,
“kafirs” (infidels) to the Sunni Taliban. “Hazara are not Muslim.
Killing them is not a sin,” Mullah Manan Niazi, the Taliban governor of
Mazar-e-Sharif, said in a public address to his followers.
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In 1998 Taliban extremists drove Hazara in their thousands from the city into the surrounding Koh-e-baba mountains.
Eight thousand were slaughtered, while others died in the cold of the
hills. Hazara farmer Juma was one of those who fled, as the Taliban
burned down his village. His eight-year-old daughter froze to death as
he held her.
“Many people were killed in the caves and the mountains when they were caught by the Taliban.”
This year, for the first time since the war in Afghanistan began,
Australia has started deporting Hazara asylum seekers back to their
country, arguing it is safe for them to return.
The Australian government concedes it is not safe for them to live in
their villages, or to travel the roads to their homelands controlled by
the Taliban and impassable. But it says it is safe for Hazara in the
capital, Kabul.
On Wednesday, Australia is due to forcibly deport a third Afghan
Hazara this year when 33-year-old Faiz (not his real name) will be put
on a plane bound for Kabul with a clutch of guards.
Once there, the guards will leave him on the streets of the city he fled more than two years ago.
Faiz was a farm worker from Jaghori district who says he was
kidnapped twice by the Taliban and impressed into forced labour before
being released.
He says he was told by a Talib he was believed to be a spy for the Americans, and warned he was on his last chance.
Last year, the Australian government’s assessment process found Faiz
was not a refugee requiring Australia’s protection, and that it was safe
for him to return.
But the Refugee Council of Australia has briefed immigration
department officials that the government’s knowledge of the security
situation in Afghanistan was out of date, and that it is not safe to
send any Hazara back.
The first Afghan Hazara to be returned, Zainullah Naseri, was
deported in August. Three weeks later he was stopped by the Taliban at a
roadside checkpoint on the way to his home district of Jaghori, in the
central province of Ghazni.
Naseri was captured and chained up, beaten and tortured, while his
captors negotiated a ransom for his release. He fled after two days,
using a rock to smash the chains that held his feet, and escaping
through the crude sewerage system. He is now living, still in hiding, on
the streets of the capital.
The first Afghan Hazara to be
returned by Australia, Zainullah Naseri, was deported in August. He was
captured by the Taliban, chained up, beaten and tortured. Photograph: Abdul Karim Hekmat for the Guardian
Another Hazara man, Australian-Afghan Sayed Habib Musawi, who
returned home to see his grandchildren, was pulled off a bus at a
similar illegal Taliban checkpoint, on a nearby road between Jaghori and
Kabul. He was tortured before being shot and his body was dumped on the
side of the road.
Faiz is from the same Jaghori district as Zainullah and Sayed. All
the roads between Kabul and Jaghori are controlled by the Taliban.
At least another six Hazara men have been “redetained” by Australian
authorities, in anticipation of their expected deportation in the new
year.
From 1 January to 30 June, the United Nations documented 4,853
civilian casualties in Afghanistan, a 24% rise compared with 2013, when
casualties in turn were 14% higher than in 2012.
Suicide attacks in Afghanistan’s cities have risen 68%, and women and
the young are particularly at risk. A third of the civilians killed
this year have been children.
Australia’s ambassador to the UN, Gary Quinlan, told the security
council in September: “We have seen an increase in civilian casualties …
recent attacks involving large numbers of fighters are a particularly
worrying trend.”
Benjamin Lee, a former human rights lawyer for the UN in Afghanistan,
says the withdrawal of foreign troops has left a chasmic power vacuum
in Afghanistan.
“This has changed the war’s dynamics. Afghan security forces are now
clashing with Taliban and other insurgent groups in villages, in
communities, in populated areas,” Lee says. “Mortar rounds,
rocket-propelled grenades, heavy and small arms fire, improvised bombs,
characterise these exchanges, and the impact on civilians is tragically
predictable.”
The Taliban are moving away from the patient guerrilla tactics of
their war of attrition with the overwhelming might of the US. The
Taliban fight in the streets now. More people now die from gunfire than
bombs.
“This is an emboldened Taliban, this is changes in territorial
control, this is a consequence of the withdrawal of a lot of the
advanced technological equipment that international forces had available
to them, particularly aircraft,” Lee says.
“Particular ethnic groups, including the Hazara, have been
disproportionately targeted, but the point I would convey is that it’s
simply not safe to send anyone back, regardless of their ethnicity.”
The Australian government sends deported Afghan Hazaras back to
Kabul, arguing the capital is a safe place for them to live, even if the
roads to their homelands are under insurgent control and impassable.
Once, that was undoubtedly true. During the war, while western money
was still flooding into Afghanistan, Kabul was markedly safer than the
rural provinces that surrounded it, or the cities in the restive south.
It was far from an oasis of peace, but money and western interests
brought with them some measure of security.
But with the drawdown of foreign troops during 2014, Kabul has
spiralled into regular violence. In January, a suicide bomber blew a
hole in the wall of a Kabul restaurant frequented by westerners. Two
gunmen stepped through the hole and opened fire, killing 21 people where
they ate.
Two months later the Taliban breached the supposedly-secure Serena
hotel, and killed 10 people, including two children. In June, an attack
on presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah killed 13 people. And in
August, the US sustained its highest-ranking wartime casualty since
Vietnam, when two-star Major General Harold Greene was shot dead by a
rogue Afghan soldier.
Last month, high-profile female politician Shukria Barakzai (who had
run a secret school for girls during the Taliban’s reign) was injured in
an attack on her car that killed three civilians.
And last week a suicide bomber killed a German civilian while watching a play being performed at a high school in Kabul.
“Taken together, these Kabul attacks,” Lee argues, “demonstrate that
restaurants, hotels, even the streets aren’t safe. When the top foreign
military brass can’t be protected, where does that leave the Afghan
civilians we are returning?”
A connection to the west, or a perceived sympathy for it, makes anyone a target, but particularly a member of a minority.
Zainullah Naseri’s ethnicity drew the Taliban’s attention, but it was
the Australian driver’s licence they found in his pocket that made him a
person worth capturing.
Hazara embraced the nascent democracy of post-2001 Afghanistan, in
response to the brutal oppression they had faced during the Taliban
rule.
During the next decade of foreign intervention, thousands found work
as interpreters for western forces, or truck drivers for the government.
Their children could again go to school, enrol in university or take
public service jobs.
But in 2014 the Hazara no longer have the protection of the wealthy,
powerful forces that once employed them, and find themselves again the
target of a resurgent Taliban.
“If the Taliban come back,” says Abdul Khaliq Azad from the Afghan
Strategic and Peace Studies in Kabul, “they would annihilate the Hazara
because of their staunch support for the foreign presence in
Afghanistan.”
The Taliban are back. So Hazara are leaving. Dozens of Hazara in
Kabul tell Guardian Australia they are preparing to leave Afghanistan,
by legal means or otherwise.
Supply and demand works in trafficking too. The people smugglers’
price for a ticket to Indonesia has halved in recent months, from
$12,000 to $6,000, as entire families – not just single men of working
age – decide to leave. Many have ambitions of ultimately reaching
Australia.
People in Kabul are aware of Australia’s “stop the boats” policy,
under which unauthorised vessels are forcibly turned around, or asylum
seekers removed to Nauru and PNG.
Many are discouraged, some are not.
The thousands of Hazara leaving this place are trying to get anywhere, be that Australia, or Indonesia, or Europe. They just know they have to leave.
Najibullah Naseri is from the same village as Zainullah (though no
relation). He is stuck in Kabul, unable to get home, and feeling
increasingly constricted in the capital. Every day the Taliban feel a
little closer.
“I have not seen my family in Jaghori for one-and-a-half years. So what’s the point of living here?”
He is preparing to leave, looking for a route, any route, that will
take him out of the country. “If the Afghan government can’t provide
security for us, we should free ourselves, before we are killed here.”
Failure to properly process claims for refugee status and an
overcrowded, insecure facility led to widespread frustration and two
days of rioting, report says
The aftermath of the unrest in the Manus Island detention centre. Photograph: Guardian
The violence that killed Reza Barati in the Manus Island
detention centre was “eminently foreseeable” and the Australian
government is responsible for his death, a parliamentary inquiry has
found. In a 156-page report,
the parliamentary committee found that the Australian government’s
failure to properly process claims for refugee status and an
overcrowded, insecure facility had led to widespread frustration and two
days of rioting. The report said: “The events … were eminently foreseeable and may
have been prevented. It is clear from evidence presented to the
committee that the Australian government failed in its duty to protect
asylum seekers including Reza Barati from harm.”
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Barati
was beaten to death in rioting in the detention centre on 18 February.
He was allegedly beaten with a stick by detention centre staff then had a rock dropped on his head, killing him. Two Papua New Guinean men who worked at the detention centre have been charged with his murder. Their trial is expected to begin early next year. The report said Australia had “effective control” of the centre and
should pay compensation to Barati’s family and to others injured – one
man was shot, another blinded – during the violence. The committee comprised three Labor members, two from the Coalition and one from the Greens. The two Coalition members issued a dissenting report, saying the
Manus facility had been opened by the Labor government and that the
majority report was “an attempt … to rewrite history”. But they disagreed with only two of the majority report’s six
recommendations – those that referred to payment of compensation to the
victims of the riot and access to Manus Island for journalists, lawyers
and the United Nations. The majority report also found:
The detention centre was not secure from outside incursion, despite knowledge of local hostility for more than 18 months.
The centre was overcrowded – at double its intended capacity – with new arrivals.
But it was the failure to process refugee claims, and to explain to
asylum seekers what was going to happen to them, that was the major
cause of violence, it found.
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“The
hopelessness of the situation transferees found themselves in, with no
clear path forward and no certainty for the future, was the central
factor in the incident,” the report said. The committee found that PNG and Australian staff from Transfield and
Wilson had attacked asylum seekers: “It is undeniable that a
significant number of local service provider staff, as well as a small
minority of expat staff, were involved in the violence against
transferees.” In June 2013 families and children were removed from Manus, making it
an men-only centre. This led to an “increased likelihood of tensions
leading to violence”, the committee found. It said in the aftermath of the violence the immigration minister, Scott Morrison,
had given information to the media that was wrong – he said PNG police
had never entered the detention centre, when they had – that was not
corrected for four days. Those police, the committee found, were under Australia’s effective
control. “Australia was effectively financing the PNG police mobile
squad deployed at the centre, both prior to and during the events in
which its members assaulted transferees,” the report said. The parliamentary committee asked the prime minister, Tony Abbott,
the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, and the immigration minister for
permission to visit the centre but said it had received no response from
any of them. But staff who were on the island said violence on Manus was
inevitable because of the conditions under which detainees were held. Nicole Judge, who had previously worked on Nauru, told the inquiry:
“I thought I had seen it all: suicide attempts, people jumping off
buildings, people stabbing themselves, people screaming for freedom
while beating their heads on concrete. “Unfortunately, I was wrong. I had not seen it all. Manus Island
shocked me to my core. I saw sick and defeated men crammed behind fences
and being denied their basic human rights, padlocked inside small areas
in rooms often with no windows and being mistreated by those who were
employed to care for their safety.” Morrison’s office has not returned calls seeking his response to the report. The Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, a participating member of the
inquiry, said: “We know now that Reza Barati’s death was entirely
preventable. The government was warned repeatedly that the situation
there was deteriorating and that security provisions were inadequate.” She said the minister’s behaviour after the riots had been “reprehensible”. “He lied to the Australian people and blamed the victims themselves.
The mountain of evidence submitted to this inquiry all points to one
undeniable fact: the Manus Island centre is untenable and must be closed
down now.” The dissenting report acknowledged “logistic and operational”
challenges on Manus, but said the government had overcome these with
upgrades to infrastructure and improvements to work practices and
training. It did not comment on the findings of the majority report that Morrison had misled the Australian public. Amnesty International
Australia’s refugee coordinator, Dr Graham Thom, said asylum seekers
and refugees on Manus were still not safe. “The PNG and Australian
governments now propose to move recognised refugees into the community
on Manus Island, with no apparent steps taken to ease hostility between
the detainees and the community on Manus Island, nor to protect the
refugees placed in the community from reprisals and further violence.”
Minister for Immigration and Border Protection,
Scott Morrison, is the only minister who is not answerable to anyone for
his decisions, with the exception of the decision to take us into war,
which can be made by the Prime Minister alone.
New legislation passed
this week gives Morrison unprecedented, unchallengeable and secret
powers to determine the futures of those who come to Australia seeking
sanctuary from homelands that are no longer hospitable to them. This
includes the practice of refoulement, the ability to return asylum
seekers to situations that are hostile and in some instances deadly
without first determining if they are at risk, a practice that is
inconsistent with international refugee law: Section 197
gives the government express permission to engage in refoulement
irrespective of whether there has been an assessment of Australian
obligations to that person.
Morrison is not required to determine in advance what risks an asylum
seeker will face in being returned to the country they’ve fled,
therefore, he has the power to send human beings to endure torture and
death, and nobody will ever know he’s done it.
Within his area of responsibilities, Morrison is now a dictator. In
the midst of a government determined to be as small a government as
possible there is a department with a dictator at its head, whose
control over some human beings is absolute.
In principle giving any politician, or any human being for that
matter absolute power over anything, cannot be good. Absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Why is it necessary?
Of course, it isn’t necessary in any way other than the political. It
serves the government’s purposes to cloak the fates of asylum seekers
and refugees in secrecy. It doe not make our borders any more secure, it
does not prevent us from being attacked by terrorists. What Morrison’s
new dictatorship does do is fly in the face of the tenets of our liberal
democracy, specifically its opposition to suspicion of concentrated
forms of power, whether by individuals, groups or governments.
There is no reason why the people of this country should be kept in
the dark about our government’s decisions as to the fate of asylum
seekers and refugees, or any other decision our government takes, unless
it is a matter of security. No matter how hard the Abbott government
has worked to frame waterborne asylums seekers as a threat to our
sovereign borders against which we are waging a war, they are not a
threat and this is not a war.
The passing of the latest legislation finalises the relentless
campaign conducted by both major parties to “stop the boats.” It has
taken the matter of asylum seekers arriving by boat out of the public
conversation. While this will come as relief to many politicians, the
rest of us should be very afraid that in our treasured liberal democracy
we have a minister who answers to nobody, and will conduct his
nefarious business in absolute secrecy. This cannot be good for anyone.
THANKS TO THOSE IDIOT SENATORS WHO ARE NOW IN AUSTRALIA'S HALL OF SHAME SCOTT MURDERSON IS NOW OMNIPOTENT.
New law gives Morrison unprecedented control over asylum seekers
Immigration Minister Scott Morrison now has unchecked power to
decide the outcomes that will affect the lives of asylum seekers and
refugees coming to Australia. Previous immigration ministers have had…
No other minister has the same unchecked control over the lives of other people as the immigration minister has. AAP/Lukas Coch
Immigration Minister Scott Morrison now has unchecked
power to decide the outcomes that will affect the lives of asylum
seekers and refugees coming to Australia. Previous immigration ministers
have had this power, but the passage of the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014 this week handed Morrison unprecedented, unchallengeable and secret powers to control the lives of asylum seekers.
So, what does this mean for Australia’s obligations under international law?
It means that Australia is now no longer obliged to adhere to the UN Refugee Convention
– a treaty Australia was instrumental in constructing and implementing
after the Second World War. Australia was, at that time, at the
forefront of human rights in terms of the status of refugees. It signed
the initial UN convention and the subsequent 1967 Protocol. This had previously set the framework for Australian immigration and refugee policy.
It also highlighted and placed Australia as a “good world citizen”
with an agenda to uphold human rights, and, in this case, treat people
seeking sanctuary with dignity, fairness and compassion.
Refugee law is built upon the fundamental principle of non-refoulement:
that is it is forbidden to return a person to a country where they may
still be persecuted or tortured. This is recognised by every country and
exists in the Refugee Convention.
Morrison’s bill, now Australian law, states that:
… it is irrelevant whether Australia has non-refoulement obligations in respect of an unlawful non-citizen.
This is saying that Australia is now entitled to return an asylum
seeker to a country where they have been, or know they may be, tortured
or persecuted.
Arrivals by boat will also no longer have access to the Refugee
Review Tribunal. They will have an appeal mechanism which is not a
hearing but only a paper review. This too is an alarming and worrying
development.
Evolution of ministerial powers
Asylum seekers first entered the Australian psyche in the late 1970s
when Vietnamese “boat people”, as they became known, reached our
northern shores.
To the then-Fraser government’s credit, the Vietnamese asylum seekers
were well received. The government acknowledged Australia’s legal
obligations, recognising the interests of the asylum seekers but
complying with the UN declarations. Various waves of asylum seekers have
arrived from other countries since then, with differing and hardening
treatment of them.
Immigration ministers have extended powers compared to other
ministers. The refugee determination system is an administrative system
based on ministerial discretion. This means the immigration minister of
the day has powers to overrule any decisions made by tribunal
determination panels and to have individual decision-making in any
determination application.
Ministerial discretion powers were inserted in to the Migration Act in a 1989 amendment
to provide an outlet to deal with difficult cases that did not fit
statutory visa criteria. Under the act, the minister may substitute a
more favourable decision than the one handed down by a tribunal:
… if the minister thinks it is in the public interest to do so.
Significantly, the discretionary powers are non-compellable,
non-reviewable and non-delegable within domestic law. This means that
the minister does not have a duty to exercise the discretionary powers;
the powers must be exercised personally by the minister and cannot be
delegated.
This has led to inconsistencies in the refugee determination system
over the decades when ministers have changed. Some have used this power
extensively, for example Philip Ruddock in 2003. Others, such as Robert Ray in 1989, have relieved themselves of the discretionary powers.
The passage of Morrison’s bill gives a new interpretation to these
powers. Australia will now follow a new, independent and self-contained
statutory framework, and this will have the government’s own
interpretation of international law. Australia now regards itself as
free from the bonds of the Refugee Convention.
Any checks and balances that were previously in Australia’s refugee
system have been stripped away, removing basic protections for those who
arrive seeking asylum. No other minister – not the prime minister, the
foreign minister nor the attorney-general – has the same unchecked
control over the lives of other people.
Morrison now has unchecked power and control over asylum seekers' lives. His decisions cannot be challenged.
In a lifelong experience of following politics I have, until now,
never witnessed children being horse traded, and senators being
blackmailed, for the passing of legislation. In this case to reintroduce
Temporary Protection Visas.
It looks as though Immigration Minister Scott Morrison (and the senators) have taken the yes side on the ageless Christian ethical dilemma “Does the end justify the means”.
It is a fascination to me as to why people assume that religion has
some form of monopoly on morality. And even worse, they pretend to speak
on Gods behalf in dispensing it.
Morrison said:
“I will not take moral lectures from Bill Shorten or
Sarah Hanson-Young when it comes to border protection on that or any
other issues,’’
Abbott said:
“So this is a win for Australia, it’s also a win for humanitarian values, it’s a win for human decency’’
Jesus said:
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
We are all wired for decency and conscience with or without religion.
Some understand it better than others illustrated by either what we do
or don’t do. By our mercy and compassion or deficiency in it.
Morrison like many of the Cabinet are serious practicing Christians
who interpret God’s word to fit snugly with their political ideology.
They easily accommodate policy with their own definition of scripture,
justifying their immorality to themselves. An evil in itself.
As someone who spent many years in a church environment similar to
Morrison s (now an open-minded atheist) I can assure the reader that
there are many who think like Morrison. They worship their politics and
religion without demarcation. In doing so they believe that telling the
truth isn’t necessarily in their best interests.
This government seems intent on imposing its own particular form of
Christianity on an unsuspecting population. And I might add, one that is
completely at odds with current Papal uttering on social inequality.
The decision to sack highly credentialed social workers, doing
excellent work in high schools and replace them with accredited
Chaplains is outrageous.
And now it seems that taxpayer funds are to be used to fund the training of Priests in religious institutions.
What ever happened to the secular society?
The fools that frequent the senate.
The inexperienced cross-bench senators buckled into the ransom
dangled before their collective conscience and awarded the executive the
power to ‘’play God ‘’ with the lives of those seeking safety from this
supposed Christian nation.
In all fairness it could not have been an easy decision.
Senator Muir, said he was:
“Forced into a corner to decide between a bad decision and a worse decision, a position I do not wish on my worst enemies”.
Maybe the Palmer United Party senators felt the same.
It has also been reported that Morrison’s department had children on
Christmas Island phone Muir and beg their freedom even giving them the
phones to do so. Now that’s something straight out of the “classic
hostage situation” handbook. That’s what terrorists do with hostages.
So, with the passing of this Bill what have we ended up with?
Crikey put it this way, calling it an immoral disgrace:
“At 8.06 this morning it was done: the House of Representatives
passed the government’s Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation
Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014, following
its passage and amendment just after midnight in the Senate.
Parliamentarians then got to go home for Christmas, having delivered the
Immigration Minister extraordinary powers that in effect obliterate any
further pretence that Australia regards asylum seekers as human beings.
The bill restored the failed Howard-era policy of temporary
protection visas, a mechanism that actually increased boat arrivals when
last attempted. Whether Clive Palmer seriously believes that there is a
pathway to citizenship contained in a kind of homeopathic form within
the legislation — or it merely suits its purposes to pretend there is —
we don’t know, but Scott Morrison has been crystal clear that TPVs will
never provide permanent protection.
But the bill goes much further, freeing Australia from any
obligations associated with the Refugee Convention, including giving
Morrison and his department — which has repeatedly demonstrated it is
profoundly incompetent and resistant to the most basic forms of
accountability — the power to return people to torture and persecution
without judicial review.”
On the one hand cross bench senators like Ricky Muir, Nick Xenophon
might argue that the end does indeed justify the means. After all there
will be many freed from their dreadful incarceration and the migrant
intake has been increased. But did they consider that Morrison already
held powers to resolve these issues, to release people. Especially
children. His threat was that unless they passed his legislation they
could rot in hell.
They could have called his bluff.
Their pretentious anguish at having to deal with such a choice can’t hide the grim reality of their actions.
Greg Barnes (a spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance and barrister) put this way:
“But in passing this legislation Senator Muir and his colleagues
have done what many would think is unconscionable in a society that
supposedly subscribes to the rule of law – allow the executive to “play
God” with the lives of those in our world who want to put their case for
asylum to a rich, developed world country with ample capacity to take
them.”
Morrison is now effectively above the High Court and our conformity
to the International Convention on Refugees has been written out of our
law.
The bill, in all probability is the most immoral ever passed by an Australian Parliament.
Not only that, it is also bad policy. It says much about the leaders
of this country and their shameful misrepresentation of the faith they
profess to follow.
No matter in what sphere of government policy (immigration, health,
pensioners, education etc) one looks, you find the hand of Abbott’s hate
on those who refuse to join Team Australia.
He seeks to reward those who follow and punish those who don’t. In
the past week much has been written about the horrendous failings of his
government.
A lot has centered on Abbott’s credentials as a leader. Therein lies
the fundamental problem. For those of us who have followed his career
closely, it’s easy. He has none.
Leviticus 19:33-34
“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him
wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native
among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in
the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
