The Catholic Weekly

Sydney
29 June 2003

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‘Appoint acting judges’ to solve visa backlog

By Chris Lindsay

The independent Catholic lobby group PolMin has called for the appointment of 15 acting Federal Court judges to handle a massive backlog of asylum visa cases arising from last year’s High Court decision that the Refugee Review Tribunal had dealt unfairly with two claims.

Between 5000 and 7000 asylum seekers are now entitled to have their cases re-heard. However, only three Federal Court judges have been assigned to hear them.

The problem occurred when the High Court decided that asylum seekers were entitled to put all their evidence to the Refugee Review Tribunal, not just the evidence that the Tribunal considered relevant.

This meant that all asylum seekers whose cases had previously been rejected by the Tribunal were entitled to have them re-heard with evidence not previously considered.

“These asylum seekers now have the right to re-present their cases, but they also have the right to have them dealt with in a reasonable period of time,” says PolMin spokesman James McGillicuddy.

“Obviously with only three judges hearing the cases this will take years.

“Meanwhile the asylum seekers are either in detention waiting for their cases to be re-heard or waiting for deportation, or have gone overseas and will have to come back to have the case re-heard.

“This whole situation can be easily resolved if the Federal Attorney General, Darryl Williams, requests the appointment of more acting Federal Court judges to handle the matters.

“We think 15 acting judges would be an appropriate number.”

Mr McGillicuddy said that after the High Court decision the Federal Gov-ernment had the choice of directing the cases be heard as a class action or choosing to have them heard individually.
“It could be argued that by directing each case be heard individually the Federal Government is trying to discourage asylum seekers pursuing their right to claim asylum,” he said.

“The Government just wants them to say ‘this is all too hard’, give up and go home.

“But we feel this is unjust. It was not their responsibility that the method the Refugee Review Tribunal was using to decide cases was faulty.”