Bulletin

Issue: July/August 2007

News

Asylum seekers to speak for themselves

A new study will chart the views of those stranded on Australia’s offshore border.

According to La Trobe international law expert Dr Savitri Taylor, the Australian government has created an offshore border to keep asylum seekers out of Australia.

Among other things, Australia funds agencies in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea to intercept asylum seekers and to look after them pending resolution of their cases.

In this complex web of arrangements, who takes responsibility for human rights? This question is being examined by Dr Taylor and her La Trobe colleague, Professor Sandy Gifford.

The researchers have received ARC funding of $67,000 for a collaborative project with the Jesuit Refugee Service Australia and Oxfam Australia to investigate the situation within the host countries.

Dr Taylor has spent years rifling through Senate Estimate papers and poring over the fine print of international human rights treaties to make sense of the arrangements.

‘Australia runs a very active program of engagement with Indonesia and PNG,’ Dr Taylor says. ‘We help these countries with legislation, border management systems and training. We have spent millions of dollars to create an offshore border. If an asylum seeker gets here, immigration authorities believe they haven’t done their job correctly.’

Now, the investigators will speak to the people affected by Australia’s immigration policies.

The Government estimates that more than 1,000 people are in the Asia/Pacific region with some interest in being smuggled to Australia. Many have been intercepted by authorities. Some 240 people, for example, were detained until recently on the island of Lombok.

Researchers will travel to Indonesia and PNG to interview asylum seekers, government officials and members of Non-Government Organisations such as the International Organisation for Migration and the Office of the UN High Commission for Refugees. One hundred interviews will be conducted in Indonesia, 50 in PNG and 30 in Australia.

‘My hypothesis is that you can’t count on human rights protection being that good if it is not the focus of attention,’ says Dr Taylor.

‘Australia puts more effort into border control than protection in the transit countries. There is no-one with a stake in ensuring people are protected so, it’s likely they won’t be.’

Australia is one of the few countries in the region that is a party to the Refugee Convention. Indonesia classes asylum seekers as illegal immigrants and may send them back to their countries of origin.

Within Australia there have been large-scale ‘civil society mobilisations’ around detention centres, but there is less visibility outside our borders, Dr Taylor warns. The new study will probe whether there is a gap in protection.