Fears of mass deportations as freeze lifted

Last week Immigration Minister Chris Bowen announced the immediate lifting of the six month freeze imposed in April on the processing of Afghan asylum seekers. The decision was cautiously welcomed by UNHCR and other refugee advocates, yet they also warned against praising the government for ending a policy that should not have been introduced in the first place.

The freeze was immediately condemned as illegal and discriminatory by three leading barristers from the Human Rights Law Resource Centre. In their opinion, the suspension policy infringed  “on the principle of non-discrimination contained in Article 3 of the Refugee Convention… and Article 2 of the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination.” Furthermore, the freeze left over a thousand asylum seekers in limbo facing what mental health experts have extensively documented as the detrimental effects of indefinite detention. Finally, the suspension policy violated the government’s own key immigration values which state that detention is to be used “only as a last resort and for the shortest practical time.”

Unsurprisingly, it is now clear that the freeze resulted in major bottlenecks in the processing system and significant overcrowding in immigration detention facilities. DIAC figures show that as of mid-August, of the almost 5000 people in detention, almost half of those, or 2248, were from Afghanistan.  1200 of these were affected by the freeze. The backlog of claims is likely to take months, if not years to clear.

The psychological trauma for refugees stuck in this backlog is already beginning to surface. Just last week asylum seekers held in Darwin detention centre complained that they were “going crazy” due to their indefinite detention. The stress is creating all sorts of psychological problems, as one detainee describes, “I’m losing my hair from the head and the beard.” In their desperation, many are resorting to hunger strikes which have resulted in regular hospitalisations for health issues such as kidney damage. Self-mutilation is also soaring with recorded cases quadrupling in the past year. Recent cases include a young person in Melbourne lacerating their arms in a recurrent case presenting at the children’s hospital and an adolescent male in Darwin who cut his wrists, after complaining to a visitor of his “brain exploding.” The director of the Centre for International Mental Health at Melbourne University, Harry Minas, called the spike in self harm a “predictable” outcome caused in part by “the pause on processing claims by Sri-Lankan and Afghan asylum seekers.”

Despite the overwhelming evidence pointing to the utter failure of the policy, the new Immigration Minister Chris Bowen has tried to retrospectively justify the freeze by arguing that the six-month suspension gave his department important new information about Afghanistan that would inform new decisions as processing of the 1200 asylum seekers resumed.

However, recently revealed information about a flawed Government assessment used to determine the legitimacy of refugee claims from Afghanistan casts doubts on Mr Bowen’s claim. The February assessment by the Australian embassy in Kabul states that many ethnic Hazaras in Afghanistan are fleeing the country as economic migrants, not genuine refugees, and that they are living in a “golden age”. The Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre’s executive director and principal solicitor, David Manne, said the document was “notorious” and was one of the “key sources” used to reject Afghan asylum claims. Associate Professor at the Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies at the Australian National University, James Jupp, stated that “you’d have to have a strong imagination” to believe that “anybody’s having a golden age at the present moment.”

The revelation of this report is particularly worrisome given that the proportion of Afghans whose claims for refugee status are accepted has fallen from 95 per cent at the start of the year to about 30 per cent at the present time. Even more concerning is the indication given by Chris Bowen that this trend will probably continue so that an increase in deportations is likely. “The percentage of successful refugee claims is likely to be lower than in the past,” he said.

Australia may very well be in breach of its commitments to the Refugee Convention which explicitly prohibits governments returning persons to countries were they face persecution. Investigations in the past have already exposed the shameful fact that a number of returnees from Australia and their children have been killed or are still living today with a well founded fear of persecution. Unfortunately, it appears as if those lessons have not been learned, or even worse, are simply being ignored.