How Gillard’s planned new laws breach the Refugee Convention

The Gillard Government’s ‘Migration Legislation Amendment (Offshore Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2011 breaches all the key legal obligations we have as a signatory under the Refugee Convention contrary to the Prime Minister’s claims.

What this law breaches under the Refugee Convention

Article 16: Access to Courts
These legislative amendments provide no legal guarantee of ‘free access to the courts’. It fails to do so because there is no legal requirement anywhere in these amendments that a person will have the right to judicial review nor that they can only be sent to a country where such a right exists.

Article 31: Refugees Unlawfully in the Country of Refugee
Article 31 is breached because Australia is imposing penalties on asylum seekers on account of them arriving undocumented and by boat to Australia. The penalty being to send them offshore to be processed because of how they arrived in Australia.

Article 32: Expulsion
The proposed laws breach Article 32 because Australian cannot expel a refugee lawfully in their country unless it is on the grounds of national security or public order, neither of which apply.

And

The proposed laws also breach the legal requirement under Article 32 to not expel a refugee without such a decision being made in accordance with ‘due process of the law’.

Article 33: Prohibition of Expulsion or Return (“Refoulement”)
The proposed laws breach our legal duty not to return people to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened. It does this by not requiring the Minister to have any legally binding agreement or evidence that a country will not do this. In the absence of this there can be no actual guarantee this will not happen.