Australia pushes on with asylum seeker deterrence

As Australia moves ahead with a plan to resettle some 1,000 refugees in Cambodia, its government is trying tochange a range of laws so as to give it a freer hand to dismiss future asylum claims. 

IRINN News reported that, as of 30 September there were 1,060 people on Manus Island (all adult men) and 1,140 on Nauru, including 239 women and 186 children. Australia’s off-shore processing centres, which house migrants mostly from Sri Lanka, Iran, Vietnam and Afghanistan, have come under repeated criticism for their conditions of detention, including in 2013 when the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said: “The physical conditions within detention, together with the slowness of processing and the lack of clarity regarding safe and sustainable solutions for refugees were likely, together, to have a serious and negative effect on the health and welfare of people transferred from Australia.”

Earlier this year, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison touted the Cambodia transfer as, “an arrangement where people are being resettled in a country that has signed the Refugee Convention, being supported by another signatory to the Refugee Convention.” 

Then, introducing the “Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment” in September, he argued: “The new statutory framework will enable parliament to legislate... without referring directly to the Refugee Convention and therefore not being subject to the interpretations of foreign courts or judicial bodies which seek to expand the scope of the Refugee Convention well beyond what was ever intended by this country or this parliament.” The controversial bill is now in its third reading. 

“It’s a sudden and unilateral reinterpretation of a treaty which has been signed by 145 countries around the world and has been the cornerstone of international refugee protection for over 60 years,” Daniel Webb, director of legal advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC) in Melbourne said.