May, 2013: Iranian asylum seekers caught in Indonesian waters while sailing to Australia, sit on a boat in Bali, while Australia is in talks. Firdia Lisnawati / Press Association. All rights reserved.After years of legal argy bargy the Papua New
Guinea (PNG) High Court has handed down its judgement on the constitutionality
of the Australian government-funded Manus Island Detention Centre. That
facility was set up in PNG in 2013 and has been used by the Australian
government as an off-shore “processing” prison to house “unauthorized arrival”
asylum seekers who have been apprehended by the Australian Navy in their
attempt to lodge a claim for asylum in Australia.
The PNG High Court’s decision was a
unanimous rejection of this secretive arrangement between the “border
protection” agendas of the Australian government and unconstitutional foreign
capital seeking interests in PNG politics. Manus Island Detention Centre has
been ordered to close immediately.
Because Universal Human Rights are
enshrined in the PNG constitution (unlike the Australian constitution), it was
clear from the very beginning that the Manus Island Detention centre was
unconstitutional and would not survive being challenged in the High Court. The
deal between successive Australian governments and the PNG government to
indefinitely detain boat arrival asylum seekers, and to make it clear that even
legitimate asylum seekers within this system of offshore detention would never
be accepted by Australia, is a clear abrogation of the human rights of those
asylum seekers under the terms of the UNHCR convention to which both Australia
and PNG are signatories. However, Australia and PNG approach the relationship
between their UNHCR obligations and the laws of the land in very different
ways. Placing conditions on the unconditional right for desperate
displaced people to seek asylum in signatory nations – no matter how they
arrive – is a serious abrogation of Australia’s responsibilities as a UNHCR signatory.
To Australia, being a signatory of the
UNHCR is a foreign policy commitment that seems to be outside of the terms of
Australian law. Hence, since the Howard government years, Australian
governments have radically modified Australian immigration laws so that they
are no longer governed by the UNHCR in regard to ‘boat arrival’ asylum seekers.
Now the Australian government has the power
to decide which asylum seeker claims it will actively consider, which asylum seeker
claims it will indefinitely “process” (detainees can return to their country of
origin at any time, but their asylum claims are processed very slowly if at
all), and to which asylum seeker claimants the Australian government will
definitely refuse to grant asylum, whether or not they have legitimate claims.
Charitably one might say that Australia
treats its UNHCR commitments with considerable flexibility. Actually, it is
clear that placing conditions on the unconditional right for desperate
displaced people to seek asylum in signatory nations – no matter how they
arrive – is a serious abrogation of Australia’s responsibilities as a signatory.
No
surprise
PNG law, unlike Australian law, does not
allow human rights to be legally abrogated. Australian negotiators cannot have
failed to know this when they secured PNG’s off-shore detention assistance,
firstly under the Rudd Labour government in 2013. The outcome of this PNG High
Court ruling, then, can also have been no surprise to the Australian
government. Clearly the Australian government has opportunistically used the
appeal of large injections of foreign capital to seduce the PNG government to
act, contrary to its own constitution, so as to facilitate the Australian
government in acting contrary to its UNHCR obligations. This is scandalous in
every register.
The main power blocks in Australia politics
– the ALP and the Coalition – show no signs at all of even blushing now that
the Manus Island game is up. No, they are “standing firm” on the supposed moral
high ground of their refusal to honour their UNHCR obligations.
Of course, it is not framed like that. It
is framed like this: for profoundly humanitarian reasons Australia must refuse
to honour its UNHCR obligations to these “unauthorized arrival” asylum seekers
because it is concerned for their safety at sea and because its compassionate
and principled leaders so deeply hate those despicable people smugglers who
trade in desperation and misery. Australia's compassionate
and principled leaders so deeply hate those despicable people smugglers who
trade in desperation and misery.
The Australian people have been repeatedly
told that only strong border protection could be good for these asylum seekers,
even though, clearly, strong border protection that locks out unauthorized
arrival asylum seekers obviously means that only asylum seekers who can get on
planes with at least apparently valid documents will ever have their claims considered
by Australian immigration authorities.
The Australian government has in fact decided
that the most vulnerable of displaced people – including the people on Manus
Island and Nauru – will never be helped by Australia. And yet, the Australian
government also wants to claim that it is out of humanitarian compassion for
those very excluded people that we must “stand firm” with this off-shore
detention policy.
Spades
Let us call a spade a spade. Everyone knows
that Australia’s “border protection” agenda is the opposite of compassionate
towards vulnerable people who get on boats who wish to lodge an asylum claim in
Australia.
“Border protection” is a tough deterrence
policy that wants to make the experience of being an asylum seeker in an
off-shore Australian detention facility as harrowing as possible, and which
explicitly promises to make their claims for asylum in Australia hopeless.
Further, this process is inaccessible to media or independent scrutiny as it is
now a military operation cloaked in secrecy because it claims to be protecting
the national security interests of Australia. Further, this process is inaccessible to media or independent scrutiny as it is
now a military operation cloaked in secrecy.
So in real terms, it is the boat people
themselves the Australian government has criminalized, dehumanized and
demonized, and it is against them that Australian politicians on both sides of
party power have uncompromisingly “stood firm” in refusing to open their hearts
with human compassion to the plight of the desperate.
Alas, unscrupulous people smugglers and horrifying
drownings at sea are a convenient propaganda opportunity that grants Australian
politicians a delusional moral fig leaf to place over their callous indifference
to the plight of vulnerable asylum seekers. It is in protection of this
ridiculous moral fig leaf that Australian politicians now all “stand firm” and
will not take any recognized refugees from Manus Island back to Australia.
The fact is, since the emergence of the
post-9/11 climate of externalized fear, both major Australian party blocks have
used the “border protection” idea to explicitly harden the Australian heart to
the world’s most vulnerable people in order to play to the invasion fears and
collective insecurities of the Australian electorate. That is what is really
going on here.
As an Australian I have to wonder when we are
ever going to be ashamed about our opportunistic and self-interested
manipulation of our neighbours, and our scapegoating lack of compassion for
asylum seekers? If we cannot even feel shame over these matters, then our
nation is at a very low moral ebb.
Come on Ozzy! Do the right thing. Or at the
very least, blush.