From mandatory detention to mandatory exclusion – Australia abolishes the right to seek asylum.,The Manus ‘Solution’‏

http://www.indymedia.org.nz/articles/1047

From mandatory detention to mandatory exclusion – Australia abolishes
the right to seek asylum.
The Manus ‘Solution’

On July 19, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced the ‘Regional
Settlement Arrangement’ between Australia and Papua New Guinea. This
means that any asylum seeker attempting to enter Australia by boat will
be transported to Papua New Guinea and banned from ever settling in
Australia, effectively abolishing the right to seek asylum. In Papua New
Guinea, the asylum seekers will be processed under local law and then,
if granted refugee status, be allowed to remain there. Those not found
to be genuine refugees will be detained in Papua New Guinea until
another country takes them, or they ‘volunteer’ to return to their home
country – if they have one.

In 1992, the Labor government introduced mandatory detention – now in
2013 they have introduced mandatory exclusion.

The pact came only days after a legal challenge by the PNG leader of the
opposition, Belden Namah, was overturned by the PNG Supreme Court.
Namah's challenge was against the legality of detaining people seeking
asylum. His argument was that “the PNG Constitution protects individuals
against detention without charge, and that asylum seekers being held [on
Manus] have not been charged with any crime.” The case was dismissed
because of an alleged legal technicality. Namah said he will place the
challenge again.

Meanwhile, the first people to be sent to PNG have arrived on Christmas
Island. The boat was taken into custody hours after the pact between
Rudd and PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill was signed. The 81 people on
board – all Iranian, including families – are currently being held on
Christmas Island. Immigration Minister Tony Burke said it would take a
couple of weeks before they would be sent to Manus.

Located off the north coast, Manus is the fifth largest island in Papua
New Guinea with an area of 2,100 km², it measures around 100 km × 30 km
(roughly the dimensions of the Coromandel Peninsula). The Manus
detention centre was first established in 2001, and the last refugee was
released in 2004 (after spending ten months as the sole detainee) before
it was officially closed in 2007. An agreement was signed in 2011 to
re-open it, however it was not until after the re-introduction of the
Pacific Solution in August 2012 that it was used again. The first
refugees were taken there in November last year and some were soon
evacuated because of lack of medical facilities. In June 2013, the
Australian government stated that children under the age of seven and
pregnant women cannot stay there due to the malarial risks and issues
with medication for these particularly vulnerable groups. On June 20 –
as if to mark World Refugee Day – 22 children and their families were
moved out of the Manus Island detention facility. By the first week of
July supposedly all children had been evacuated.

The children and families may have been evacuated to divert attention
from a damning United Nations report released also in July. In the
report, the UN High Commissioner For Refugees says that conditions on
Manus are harsh and aspects of the centre are inconsistent with
international human rights. The report also states that “current
arrangements still do not meet international protection standards for
the reception and treatment of asylum-seekers.”

When the centre was re-opened last year, a joint Papua New Guinea –
Australian committee was set up to oversee the centre and ensure that
the people detained there were fairly treated. The committee has yet to
meet. Processing of asylum requests has not begun since the first people
were detained on Manus last year.

The centre is currently set to hold 300 people. By January 2014, it will
have been expanded to hold 600 people. Within the next two years, it is
planned to increase its capacity to 3,000. One classroom will be built.
Even with that increase, it is unclear how the large number of refugees
currently fleeing towards Australia could possibly be held there.

Gillard’s problem

Rudd’s announcement shouldn’t come as a surprise. Elections are coming
up in Australia in September and Rudd has just last month ousted Julia
Gillard, allegedly because she was seen knitting in public. While that
seems like a plausible explanation in a country dominated by a white
male culture, it is not the real reason Gillard had to go.

The reason is more likely the fact that, despite Gillard’s efforts, the
number of refugees heading for Australia has not declined. Gillard
re-introduced the so called Pacific Solution where asylum seekers are
held in indefinite detention on Nauru and Manus Island before eventually
being settled in Australia, but numbers still went up. In 2012, a total
of 17,000 refugees arrived in or were intercepted on their way to
Australia, while this figure for the first six months of this year is
15,000 already.

Asylum seekers and their treatment has been a highly politicised issue
in Australia for a long time. When in 2001 – another election year – the
container ship MV Tampa picked up a group of 438 shipwrecked refugees
and headed for Christmas Island with them, all hell broke loose. The
Australian government refused permission for the Tampa to dock and
threatened to prosecute the captain who was only doing what
international maritime regulations prescribe in such an event – rescue
the drowning people and take them to the nearest port.

A stand-off lasting several days ensued during which the Australian
defence minister Peter Reid publicly lied that the refugee boat had not
been sinking but rather the refugees had deliberately thrown their
children overboard. The result was that the Howard government changed
the law to retrospectively legalise the navy’s actions and to excise
Christmas Island (meaning that it is not considered part of Australia
for the purpose of migration). Eventually, most of the refugees ended up
in Nauru and some 130 were taken to New Zealand.

Since then it has been all downhill. The Tampa affair resulted in the
introduction of the Pacific Solution, which was in place until 2007,
when it was cancelled by the newly elected Labor government under Kevin
Rudd. Asylum seekers were from then on mostly processed on Christmas
Island. In 2010, Julia Gillard (after having removed Rudd) briefly
touted the ‘regional protection framework’, which included building
offshore detention centres in places such as East Timor with the
involvement of New Zealand. A year later, Gillard signed the
‘people-swap agreement’ with Malaysia, under which Malaysia agreed to
process some asylum seekers caught on their way to Australia, and
Australia would take a number of UN refugees from Malaysia in return.
However, the Australian courts overturned this agreement and in 2012,
the Gillard government re-introduced the Pacific Solution, but boat
arrivals did not decline.

And that was Juila Gillard’s problem which enabled a hard-nosed Kevin
Rudd to take over. It was entirely predictable that Rudd would come up
with drastic new measures to reduce boat arrivals and his chances of
winning the upcoming election hinges on the ‘success’ of the new ‘no
chance by boat’ policy.

The really scary bit is that Rudd’s opponent Tony Abott will have to top
this in order to win. His party has already announced that “of course
you need to go the extra distance and turn boats back where it is safe
to do so.”

Rudd’s contradictions

Rudd’s new plan is full of contradictions. It goes something like this:
asylum seekers want to come to Australia. Currently, the conditions of
indefinite detention on Manus and Nauru are not a sufficient deterrent
because 90% of them are eventually found to be genuine refugees and are
settled in Australia. Once they know that they will never make it to
Australia, they will stop coming in their shonky little boats and will
no longer remind the Australian public of wars and famines around the world.

This cynical logic is based on the assumption that those caught on the
way to Australia have made a deliberate choice to go to Australia and
not anywhere else. In Rudd’s Christian mind this is probably because
Australia is ‘god’s own’, whereas PNG is a desperately poor country that
can’t possibly cope with the influx of thousands of refugees each month.
But this is where Rudd’s logic falls apart, because if his plan works,
there won’t be thousands of refugees arriving there. Rudd knows that and
that is why – when announcing the deal in a press conference – he said
that “refugees can live safely and in prosperity in Papua New Guinea”.
If that is correct, how can being taken there be a deterrent?

The claim that one can “live safely and in prosperity in Papua New
Guinea” also contradicts Rudd’s own government officials who have
recently issued a travel warning for PNG. It lists risks as including:
high levels of crime, dangers of violent clashes, ethnic disputes,
carjacking, sexual assault, endemic levels of cholera, and high levels
of HIV. UNICEF states that “Children in Papua New Guinea remain some of
the most vulnerable children in the world.”

Of course, Rudd is well aware of the conditions in PNG, and that is why
he contradicts his own statements when he says that “people smugglers”
will be raising “nothing but false hopes” when they promise refugees to
take them to safety.

He also gets tangled up with the equally bizarre logic of the ‘no
advantage’ policy that was in place until last week. Under this regime,
introduced by Gillard in August 2012, people who allegedly “jump the
queue” (by applying for asylum in Australia, instead of waiting for
their ‘orderly’ resettlement in a UN refugee camp somewhere else), were
held in detention for as long as their ‘orderly’ resettlement would have
taken. This “myth of the queue jumper” has been widely condemned by
people familiar with the reality of UN camps. Now Rudd admits that
“these refugees are people who have languished in UN camps around the
world for years and in some case for more than a decade,” but still
insists that this is the “normal UNHCR process” that people should go
through.

The reality is that refugees who flee their country do so because they
fear for their lives, not because they know much about life in
Australia. Survivors of ship wrecks off the Australian coast often state
that they had no idea where the journey would go until they boarded the
ship. Not allowing these people to settle in Australia and instead
settling them in PNG is not going to change anything. People are not
going to stop risking their lives making the journey into the unknown
just because the destination is a different unknown.

The so-called PNG solution is certainly no solution – not for PNG, not
for the asylum seekers and maybe not even for Kevin Rudd. The boats are
not going to stop coming until the wars, the genocides and the famines
that drive people to desperation have stopped.