The New Face of the Fatal Shore: Australia's Continuing Asylum Horror Show

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It's become evident that the Australian Parliament has answered the political equivalent of a kidnapper's demand: in exchange for finally resolving the status of current refugee children, The Abbott Government will be allowed to steer the country even further away from established international standards on the treatment of asylum seekers:

In June this year the UNHCR released a report showing the number of refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people worldwide had, for the first time since WWII, topped 50 million people. Of these, 16.7 million people are classified as refugees.
In the face of this global crisis the response from Australia — one of the wealthiest nations on Earth — has been to cut our refugee resettlement intake from overseas and pass cruel, callous legislation that is arguably in breach of international law. 

We cage asylum seekers in what can only be described as tropical gulags — hellholes where disease, violence, depression and sexual assault festers — and refer to them as “illegal” even though they have committed no crime. 

When Immigration Minister Scott Morrison and his supporters talk of “illegals” they are lying, in an effort to dehumanise and demonise. As Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes perfectly clear: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." 

We deny refugees and asylum seekers fair and timely assessment and then when and if their claims have eventually been processed, we effectively deny them entry to Australia.
And bear in mind here that as of the latest figures available, about 70 per cent of the more than 2000 detainees languishing behind wire in the Manus Island and Nauru compounds who have had their claims processed have had positive determination of their refugee status.

More @ The Courier-Mail

Last week’s announcement that temporary protection visas would be reintroduced was the latest change to asylum seeker policy this year. Independent Senator Nick Xenophon said he had voted for the bill because doing nothing would be worse for asylum seekers, but critics say the new requirements will be harder for vulnerable people to prove their asylum claims. Although the bill has been amended to increase Australia’s humanitarian intake, it also restricts the definition of a refugee. As the Senate debated the merits of the legislation on Thursday, The Guardian reported that detainees on Manus Island had sewn their lips together. Their hunger strike is in protest against the length of their detention. 

One of the positives of the new bill is the amendment that children on Christmas Island will be released from detention. But Australia hasn’t been kind to refugee or asylum seeker children living in the community this year, either. The government conducted age determination meetings and gave people who said they were children new dates of birth, reclassifying them as adults. Children have gone on the run to avoid going into a detention centre. For anyone wondering why, The National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention 2014 provided some clues. 

Even those children who could not be classified as adults, such as baby Ferouz, had a tough year. In October, a judge found that Ferouz was not eligible for Australian citizenship even though he was born in Australia. This was in spite of Ferouz’s ineligibility for citizenship in his parents’ birth country because of his ethnicity. The case impacted 100 other children.

More @ Crikey

(the new legislation) 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.

More @ SBS