On June 26, President Trump tweeted that “much can be learned” from Australia’s refugee policies. Other leaders, including Italy’s Matteo Salvini and The Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, have also expressed admiration for Australia’s deterrence-based refugee policies. The numbers are convincing. In the seven years before the Liberal government’s Operation Sovereign Borders took effect, approximately 50,000 asylum seekers sought to enter Australia by boat and approximately 1,100 died at sea. Since Sovereign Borders, only two boats have reached mainland Australia, and there have been no known deaths at sea. So, is President Trump right? Does Australia provide the answer for countries wishing to deter asylum seekers, who risk their lives and the lives of their children to reach safer shores?
Closing the Back Door
Australia says that asylum seekers are welcome by the front door but not the back. Operation Sovereign Borders, the highly politicized, catch-all name attached to Australian border policy, ensures it. Operation Sovereign Borders is actually a package of legislation, featuring bills introduced by lawmakers from across the political spectrum. Most notably, it mandates that boats be turned back, and that asylum seekers undergo mandatory offshore detention until those who receive refugee status can be relocated to a third country and those who do not can be sent back home. Asylum seekers arriving by boat are met at sea by the Australian Border Force Unit, which streams video interviews of the asylum seekers back to mainland border officials who attempt to determine whether the migrants are technically refugees. If the officials conducting the interviews determine the arrivals are in fact genuine refugees, the boat is brought to a processing center — which, importantly, is not on Australian soil. Australia has opened multiple offshore processing centers in nearby territories as well as countries like Papua New Guinea and Nauru.
If none of the asylum seekers are found to be genuine refugees, the boats are turned back. And the Border Force Unit has turned back every boat it has come across in the past two years, suggesting that there has not been a single genuine refugee among the asylum seekers arriving by sea in that time. Amnesty International, which has been highly critical of Australia’s refugee policy, notes that few asylum seekers fleeing by boat will have the documentation they need to prove their case while at sea, and reports that there have been multiple accounts of poor connectivity in the video links.
Abrogating Responsibility
Under international law, though, it is not an option for Australia to assist asylum seekers arriving on its borders — it is an obligation. Australia, like most other countries, is a party to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, its Protocol, and multiple other human rights treaties. Australia also has a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, and is one of five countries making up the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. These international treaties and the multilateral institutions they emanate from seek to protect refugees from arbitrary detention, refoulement — repatriation to a country where refugees could be in danger of persecution — and physical and psychological torture.
In an interview with the HPR, Josh Watkins, a professor of global studies at the National University of Singapore who specializes in borders and border security, noted: “From the advent of the Pacific Solution in 2001, through its reincarnation in Operation Sovereign Borders, Australia’s asylum seeker policies have been condemned by UNHCR, Amnesty International, and scores of other commentators as being unnecessarily draconian.”
Erika Feller, assistant high commissioner to the UNHCR from 2006 to 2013 and a Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne School of Government, expressed that concern in an interview with the HPR. She explained that Australia’s deterrence-based asylum seeker policy “flies in the face of international treaties. Deterrence is not a mechanism that is envisaged in the 1951 Refugee Convention and it runs counter to it.”
Even after ratifying international non-refoulement agreements, Australia has turned boats back to countries where their passengers might face harm, such as Sri Lanka and Vietnam, where asylum seekers have been arrested, interrogated, tortured, and jailed. Many of the other Asia-Pacific transit countries which receive these turnbacks are not party to refugee and human rights treaties and do not have the legal or financial capacity to protect asylum seekers. As a consequence, asylum seekers find themselves in regions where they have no rights and may face persecution and imprisonment. Meanwhile, the Australian government does not document the asylum seekers sent away in these boat turnbacks; as a result, it remains impossible to hold Australia accountable for the plight of those refugees who are persecuted upon return to their home countries.
Australia’s system of mandatory and indefinite detention blatantly violates its obligations to protect asylum seekers. Australia has been condemned by a working group of the U.N.’s Human Rights Council for 51 counts of illegally holding refugees in indefinite detention, some for as long as nine years. The average length of arbitrary detention for a refugee who arrived in Australia by boat was 511 days. Australia’s policy of holding refugees in indefinite detention breaks international human rights law, taints its international standing, and undermines its credibility when denouncing other nations for the same crimes.
In an interview with the HPR, Mary Crock, a professor of law at the University of Sydney and the author of nine books on refugees, noted that “from the time mandatory detention became law in 1992 there was increased dissonance between Australia’s international legal obligations and our domestic law and practice … Our relationship with international human rights law became increasingly fractured and problematic.”
Refugees have undergone significant human rights abuses in Australia’s offshore detention centers. Human rights organizations report the absence of physical liberty, medical attention, and proper security on Manus and Nauru islands. Twelve men have died while in detention — one of them immolated himself during a U.N. monitoring visit. Since the Australian election in May, there have also been at least 26 cases of self-harm or attempted suicide on Nauru and Manus — in desperation, asylum seekers have cut themselves, gone on hunger strikes, swallowed rocks, and even sown their own lips shut. These cases were not recorded by any Australian institution until Monash University created a database of border-related deaths in 2010. To this day, no government authority collects any information on asylum seekers who have died while attempting to enter Australia, while in detention, or shortly after their release.
The secrecy which shrouds Australia’s detention centers, furthermore, runs counter to the nation’s policy of freedom of information. In 2014, the government of Nauru raised the nonrefundable application fee for a media visa from $140 to $5400 — and even paying that high price does not guarantee media access. For the past five years, the Nauruan Government has refused most media requests to visit the island and has turned down many applications before they were lodged. The Australian Government has stated that it plays no role in Nauru’s media access decisions. Yet papers circulated in the Australian Federal Court reveal that the restrictive media policies are part of a joint effort with the Australian Government.
As a result of the Border Force Act, introduced by the Liberal Government in May 2015, few Australians know anything about the plight of asylum seekers trying to reach Australia by the back door. The Liberal Government has refused to allow the release of any information relating to asylum seeker boat turnbacks, classifying this data as a matter of national security. And before it was challenged in the High Court and amended, Section 42 of the Border Force Act carried a two-year jail term for any “entrusted person” — anybody working within the immigration detention system — who makes an “unauthorized disclosure” about conditions in the camps. Section 42 now applies to the release of information that could harm the “national or public interest” if disclosed.
Opening the Front Door
The Australian Liberal-National Government maintains that while the back door is firmly closed to asylum seekers, the country fulfills its legal and moral obligations with its humanitarian resettlement program. Australia, government officials emphasize, takes more refugees per capita through its ‘front door’ — around 18,750 — than any country in the world but Canada.
Feller acknowledged the areas in which Australia is succeeding: The country “runs a big resettlement program compared to many other countries, it’s a big donor to UNHCR, and it’s in a region where there’s a lot of UNHCR’s people of concern.”
While she is also a supporter of Australia’s humanitarian resettlement program, Crock cautioned against letting it distract from Australia’s abuses: “The key people to whom Australia actually owes protection obligations under international refugee law are the asylum seekers arriving in Australia. Yet it’s those people, in particular, that Australia has singled out for punitive and adverse treatment.”
In reality, most nations do not draw their refugees from resettlement programs. Instead, they process the asylum seekers that arrive on their borders and determine whether they are genuine refugees. When total refugee processing — through both the front door and the back door — is considered, Australia’s cumulative contribution to resettling refugees, relative to other countries, changes drastically. On this more holistic measure, Australia global ranking falls — to 25th per capita and 45th relative to total Gross Domestic Product.
At What Cost?
The economic cost of Australia’s refugee policies is staggering. A report published by UNICEF revealed that Australia’s policies of boat turnbacks as well as onshore and offshore detention cost the country over $6.5 billion between 2013 and 2016. The cost of holding a single asylum seeker in offshore detention for a year was $390,000, twice as much as was spent by Canada, the United States, or any European country.
The costs of this Operation Sovereign Borders approach go well beyond the budget numbers, as the fallout impacts Australia’s reputation in the region and its immigration figures — which are key to balancing its aging population. The anti-asylum seeker rhetoric that surrounds the closed back-door approach has also infiltrated discussions of immigration. The result is that it is difficult for conservative governments to support higher rates of immigration, which are necessary for Australia’s short- and long-term growth. In the recent election campaign, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that Australia would cut immigration from 190,000 places to 160,000 places over four years beginning in 2019.
On their surface, Australia’s deterrence-based refugee policies seem to have saved lives, and the government narrative of welcoming refugees by the ‘front door’ sounds ethical enough. However, Crock explained that in many respects, the Australian government has been insincere. “On the one hand, it has been generous in the number of people per capita it has brought into the country as part of its humanitarian program. On the other hand, it is very zealous about maintaining control of who comes into the country and the circumstances in which they come, even where the people who present themselves as asylum seekers, particularly those coming by sea, have predominantly been found to be genuine refugees.”
Ultimately, behind the smoke and mirrors are policies that abrogate Australia’s legal and moral responsibilities to refugees under international law. Beyond the narrow “results” of Australia’s refugee policies are profound human, economic, free press, and reputational costs, which may ultimately do more harm than good to the country.
Perhaps Feller summed it up best: “From a UNHCR perspective, it was always very unfortunate that Australia was not setting the example that the organization hoped it would set in that region, to be a leader for promoting refugee protection and respect for refugee protection principles.”
This piece initially ran under the title “Smoke and Mirrors.”
