Refugee Rights: Submission to Inquiry into Immigration Detention (Aug 2008)

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Domestic Submissions

Refugee Rights: Submission to Inquiry into Immigration Detention (Aug 2008)

On 29 May 2008, the Joint Standing Committee on Migration announced an inquiry into immigration detention in Australia.
The Centre’s Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration focuses on the need for Australia’s immigration detention regime to ensure the full implementation of Australia’s obligations under international human rights law.
The Centre congratulates the Australian Government on its proposed reforms to Australia’s immigration detention scheme as detailed on 29 July 2008.  These reforms signal a significant and positive departure from the previous government’s immigration detention policies which constituted grave breaches of Australia’s obligations under international human rights law.  However, despite considerable improvements, the proposed immigration detention regime falls short of Australia’s international obligations in a number of respects.  The issues of concern are outlined in this submission.
As Australia celebrates the 60th anniversary of the UDHR, the Government must commit to the full implementation of its international obligations through comprehensive and robust domestic legislation that reflects a human rights approach to immigration detention.  Further, the Centre considers that compliance with human rights standards should not be a matter of policy subject to the discretion of the Minister and departmental officers, but should be enshrined in legislation.

Found in Domestic Submissions, Focus Areas - People in Detention, Law Reform and Policy Work, Our Work, Refugees and Asylum Seekers, Submissions - Refugee Rights

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BARNS: “Refuge from double standards”, The Mercury, 18Jan10

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BARNS: “Refuge from double standards”, The Mercury, 18Jan10 January 19, 2010

by Greg Barns  -  The Mercury -  18 January 2010

THERE is hypocrisy in Australia’s decisions on who is let into the country, writes GREG BARNS.

Last week the Right-wing media and their political friends worked themselves up into lather over an assessment by ASIO that a small number of Tamil asylum seekers should not be allowed into this country because they are apparently a security threat.

But when two Israeli political leaders came to Australia shortly before Christmas, those same politicians and media fawned over them, despite the fact they have been identified as possibly having committed crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Right at the outset let’s make it clear that just because ASIO assesses someone as a security threat means nothing. ASIO jumps at shadows and you have no way of knowing if its assessment is correct or not because it is secretive, unaccountable and has a history of getting it horribly wrong in the past.

But ASIO’s secret assessment of these asylum seekers was enough to get the now Far Right Liberal Party jumping. Leader Tony Abbott says the Rudd Government has put the security of Australia at risk, and his chief supporter in the media, The Australian, ran an editorial last week criticising the Rudd Government for failing to “protect our borders”.

Tragically neither The Australian nor Abbott queried for a nanosecond that ASIO might be wrong. But while The Australian or Abbott are running around condemning Tamil asylum seekers on the basis of a secret assessment by “spooks”, neither took issue with the visits just over a month ago by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and the current Israeli Deputy PM Silvan Shalom.

Yet both these men played a large part in the Gaza Offensive of a year ago. This military operation by Israel against the Palestinians resulted in 1300 Palestinians dying, and hundreds of thousands of others being displaced and injured.

The Gaza Offensive has been the subject of a major investigation and report by eminent South African jurist Richard Goldstone, who found that: “Repeatedly, the Israel defence forces failed to adequately distinguish between combatants and civilians, as the laws of war strictly require.”

Goldstone further noted that “pursuing justice in this case is essential because no state or armed group should be above the law”. Failure to do so “will have a deeply corrosive effect on international justice, and reveal an unacceptable hypocrisy. As a service to hundreds of civilians who needlessly died, and for the equal application of international justice, the perpetrators of serious violations must be held to account,” he said in his report, which he presented to the United Nations on September 29 last year.

Goldstone’s Mission found that those who were responsible for the devising, planning and execution of the Gaza Offensive — and this means Olmert and Shalom — should be held accountable for any crimes committed by Israeli forces.

Goldstone’s Mission said it found that Israel committed grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, including “wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”.

And Goldstone’s Mission found that Israeli officials and armed forces should be held accountable for crimes against humanity because of a series of “acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their rights to access a court of law and an effective remedy”.

Australian law now allows for persons suspected of having committed war crimes or crimes against humanity to be arrested and tried in this country, irrespective of where the alleged offences were committed.

One would have thought that, given the very public findings of the Goldstone report, Australian political leaders and the media would be making it clear to Shalom and Olmert that they risked arrest if they entered Australia.

You can bet if it were a Tamil leader seeking to enter Australia, about whom Goldstone-type findings had been made, that would definitely have been the reaction.

But Abbott and, it has to be said, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his deputy Julia Gillard feted their Israeli guests.

The Australian’s Greg Sheridan conducted a long and sympathetic interview with Olmert and slobbered that he spent “90 minutes in the boardroom of Sydney’s Park Hyatt, and then over a relaxed lunch with his wife, Aliza, at Circular Quay”, while “Olmert talked with remarkable frankness about the military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, the historic peace deal he offered the Palestinians, [US] President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy and the options for action against Iran”.

Would Sheridan roll out the read carpet for a Tamil leader? One thinks not. Hypocrisy and double standards are awful things.

Greg Barns is an Australian writer and political commentator who has previously advised Australian governments on policy.

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Rudd faces questions over deals to settle Tamils

TOM ALLARD

January 19, 2010

The last of the asylum seekers from the Oceanic Viking are due to leave Indonesia this week. Most are destined for New Zealand, which originally refused to take any of the 78 Sri Lankans on the customs vessel.

The development ends a challenging saga for the Rudd Government that began when the Tamils refused to get off the Oceanic Viking after being rescued on the high seas.

The situation strained relations with Indonesia, and questions remain about how the Government and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees managed to convince several countries to accept the Tamils so quickly.

Most asylum seekers in Indonesia wait four or five years before being resettled but those involved in the four-week stand-off on the Oceanic Viking will find new homes within two months thanks to a special deal brokered by Australia in exchange for their disembarkation.

''There's an indication that the movement [of the remaining Sri Lankans] is taking place this week,'' said Teuku Faizasyah, a spokesman for Indonesia's Foreign Ministry. ''It looks like it will be happening this week. If that's the case, it's good.''

Sources at the Tanjung Pinang detention centre said 13 asylum seekers would leave for the Philippines for processing tomorrow before going to New Zealand. The final three will come to Australia. Twenty-eight of the Tamils are heading to the US, 13 to Canada, 13 to New Zealand and three to Norway.

The three at Tanjung Pinang who will come to Australia will join 18 others. Twelve of those processed by Australia have been resettled on the mainland. Four who did not pass ASIO security checks, and two children of one of them, remain on Christmas Island.

New Zealand originally rejected accepting any of the asylum seekers but changed its mind for reasons that remain unclear.

Sources familiar with negotiations said all the nations initially refused to be part of the deal to resettle the ethnic Tamils.

The acting Opposition leader, Julie Bishop, said: ''The Prime Minister must disclose what he has offered to other countries as an inducement to take people from the Oceanic Viking.''

A spokesman for the Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, said Australia had ''assisted the UNHCR to find resettlement solutions for the passengers on board the Oceanic Viking'' but denied there had been any inducements to other countries.

Mr Faizasyah said Indonesia was anxious that the episode was not repeated and suggested his country would not be prepared to accept boat people intercepted by an Australian vessel again.

''We don't foresee a similar situation happening in the future,'' Mr Faizasyah said.

Meanwhile, at the Javan port of Merak, almost 250 Sri Lankan asylum seekers continue to live in squalid conditions and are refusing to disembark from their boat after a 100-day stand-off.

They want the same deal as their fellow countrymen on the Oceanic Viking have received but their demands have been rebuffed by Australia, even though they were detained by the Indonesian Navy following a personal request from Mr Rudd.

with Jonathan Pearlman

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