(New York) -- In a letter to Australian Prime Minister John Howard on the eve of the Australian general election, Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Committee for Refugees called on the Australian government to improve its treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. The letter was also sent to Kim Beazley, leader of the opposition Australian Labor Party.
"Over the past few years the Australian government has promoted a climate of xenophobia and hostility towards refugees, asylum seekers and migrants," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "The next government has got to do a better job of protecting refugees."
Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Committee for Refugees were particularly critical of recent amendments to Australian law that prevent most asylum seekers who arrive at offshore parts of Australia, such as Christmas Island, Ashmore and Cartier Islands, and the Cocos Islands, from making an asylum application. The Australian government transports some of these asylum seekers to other Pacific island states while their refugee claims are assessed. Others are simply sent back to sea.
"Australia has created a legal fiction to avoid its international obligations towards refugees," said Bill Frelick, Director of U.S. Committee for Refugees.
The advocacy groups said that by turning away boats of asylum seekers and forcing them back into international waters Australia could violate the fundamental principle of non-refoulement - the obligation not to send an asylum seeker in any manner whatsoever to a country where his or her life or freedom would be threatened. By denying asylum seekers access to refugee determination procedures, the legislation also undermines the fundamental right to seek asylum, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and places the lives of asylum seekers at risk.
The Australian government has pursued a policy of turning back boatloads of asylum seekers and migrants, most of them from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries in the Middle East and South Asia, and returning them to international waters since mid- August, when it turned away a boatload of 438 asylum seekers who were rescued by a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, from a sinking Indonesian ferry. Most of the mainly Afghan asylum seekers were sent to the Pacific island state of Nauru; smaller numbers were sent to New Zealand.
Since then the Australian navy has intercepted and turned away several boatloads of asylum seekers. Many of the boats arrive in Australia via Indonesia, which is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and which lacks laws and procedures for determining refugee status. Although an understaffed UNHCR office functions in Indonesia, the government does not guarantee that asylum seekers will be protected from return to countries where they could face persecution. On October 19, 374 migrants and asylum seekers trying to reach Australia drowned when the dilapidated Indonesian fishing boat they were traveling on sank.
The two organizations also criticized measures under the new legislation that narrow the definition of a refugee and require the detention of asylum seekers arriving at an "excised offshore place" without any right to judicial review. Australia's policy of mandatory detention for all unauthorized arrivals, including asylum seekers, and its failure to inform immigration detainees of their legal rights have already been heavily criticized by human rights groups and the international community.
"The potentially indefinite detention of all non-citizens and asylum seekers without judicial review violates fundamental norms against prolonged arbitrary detention," said Frelick. "Australia should as a matter of priority review its immigration detention policies to ensure that they comply with its international obligations."
Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Committee for Refugees made a plea to the next government to amend the new provisions in Australian law to ensure that they are consistent with international human rights and refugee law, and in the interim to ensure that the legislation is implemented in a manner that upholds fundamental human rights principles.
Finally, the two groups called on the next Australian government to end the use of inflammatory and xenophobic rhetoric when explaining Australia's refugee and immigration policies and to provide the public with full information about Australia's share of the global refugee crisis.
"The Australian government tends to give the impression that it is being overrun by asylum seekers," said Roth. "In reality, Australia takes in a tiny proportion of the world's refugees."
Between January and July 2001, 7,886 individuals sought asylum in Australia - most of them from Afghanistan and Iraq. In the same period 39,255 people sought asylum in the United Kingdom and 48,879 in Germany. In 2000, the ratio of refugees to total population was 1: 1,138 in Australia, 1: 681 in the United Kingdom, and 1: 456 in Germany. In contrast, much poorer countries such as Pakistan and Iran, hosted more than two million and 1.5 million Afghan refugees respectively, a ratio of 1: 75 and 1: 36 refugees to total population in each country. Some 135,000 Afghan refugees have entered Pakistan in the past two months alone.
The complete text of the letter to Prime Minister Howard can be read online here
