End Mandatory Detention
Australia has a policy of mandatory detention for all refugees and asylum seekers who arrive by boat on its shores. This represents a radical departure from any other country that signs the United Nations Conventions - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In June 2001 an all party Federal Parliament Human Rights Committee found conditions in some detention centres are appalling, with standards often below those experienced in Australian jails.
According to Justice Marcus R. Einfeld "Mandatory sentencing - which I prefer to call compulsory jailing - is a nasty insidious creation of our generation that not even the convict settlement introduced. What is more - compulsory jailing legislation expressly abandons the internationally agreed principle of imprisonment as a sanction of last resort, with priority given to other interests."
The Department of Immigration site has information about the number of people still in detention
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Permanent resident, not Temporary Protection Visas
Even when asylum seekers have satisfied the Department of Immigration that they are "genuine refugees", this country has a characteristically ungenerous way of treating them. They are granted a Temporary Protection Visa which denies them security and certainty, and deprives them of certain fundamental needs such as access to English classes and the right to family reunion. Those who have come here following traumatic events find this especially hard.
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No to the "Pacific Solution"
Australia's off-shore detention of asylum seekers has been called the Pacific Solution. The Pacific Solution exports Australia's controversial policy of mandatory detention to other, poorer countries. The Pacific detention camps are surrounded by even more secrecy than the detention centres in remote Australia.
The living conditions on Nauru have been strongly criticised in a report commissioned by Amnesty International: 'Conditions are harsh, with the heat and humidity consistently in the upper thirties and health facilities are basic . . . medical staff does its best, but is nowhere near providing the essential psychological care that these people need, and need more with every day that passes.'
While there is no longer any asylum seekers being held in the Manus Island detention centre in PNG (since the release of Aladin Sisalem in late May 2004), the government continues to pay $23 000 per day to keep the detention centre open.
For more background on the "Pacific Solution" visit the Refugee Action Collective, Victoria site
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No deportations
The Australian government has a policy of deporting asylum seekers back to the countries from which they have fled in terror.
In October 2004, The Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education released a report about refugee deportations from Australia. The report, Deported to Danger was the result of a two-year project spanning 11 countries and involving interviews with 50 asylum seekers who had been deported from Australia. Material gathered from 10 deportees was withheld due to safety concerns, and of the remaining 40, only five had found safety.
The report states: "This investigation is concerned with the growing volume of claims which speak of people spending fear-filled lives in hiding or, even worse, disappearance, imprisonment, torture or death after being deported from Australia."
The report found that the government had deported people to countries such as Iran, Algeria, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan where they faced extreme danger. To do this, the immigration department sometimes used false documents.
Chemical injection was another theme of the report. At least five rejected asylum seekers claimed they had witnessed injections or been threatened with injection.
Click here for more information on the Deported to Danger report
Even people who have been granted refugee status and given a Temporary Protection Visa have no guarantee that they can stay in Australia. They can be sent back any time the Government decides their country is "safe" for them. They have to live their lives with this uncertainty hanging over them and it is very cruel.
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SIEV-X
On Friday 19 October 2001, 353 asylum seekers, destined for Australia, drowned when their grossly overloaded fishing boat sank. Although 120 passengers survived the boat's sinking, only 44 were rescued, after that had spend 20 hours in the water.
But this was not death by misadventure: not the kind of disaster suffered by thousands of other desperate asylum seekers seeking a new home. The boat dubbed SIEV-X was organised to sink, with probable loss of life, as a deterrent to others.
And there is considerable and growing circumstantial evidence that the Australian government may have had some involvement in the sinking of the boat, and the long delay in rescuing survivors.
Rather than tell the truth about SIEVX, the government has told lies about the sinking, lies about what it knew,
prevented witnesses from testifying, and attempted to blacken the public reputation of Tony Kevin, the former Australian
Ambassador to Cambodia, who first raised concerns about SIEV-X.
At a public discussion of his book, A Certain Maritime Incident-the sinking of the SIEV X hosted by the Refugee Action Network on February 24 05, Tony Kevin convincingly rebuked those who have sought to undermine his work.
Click here for a transcript of Tony Kevin's address
For the truth about the drowning of the SIEV-X, see siev.com website
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