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Call for neutral review of asylum seeker process
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Printable version |
| By Damir Govorcin
10 February, 2013 |
Jesuit Refugee Service Australia (JRS) has urged the Federal Government to put in place an independent committee to review and monitor all elements of the offshore processing regime.
The call comes following a UN High Commissioner for Refugees report which has found “significant inadequacies” in the transfer, treatment and processing of asylum-seekers from Australia to the assessment centre at Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.
“The existing interim committee is made up of government officials and members of the Minister of Immigration’s own advisory council, and the current conditions on Nauru and Manus Island make it clear that a more independent monitoring body, with teeth, should be established as a matter of urgency,” said JRS director Fr Aloysious Mowe SJ.
The report said the policy and practice of detaining all asylum-seekers on a mandatory and indefinite basis, without an individual assessment or possibility for review, amounts to “arbitrary detention which is inconsistent with the obligations of both Australia and PNG under international human rights law”.
Fr Mowe says Australia is evading its international obligations by sending asylum seekers to countries such as Papua New Guinea and Nauru that, while parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention, lack the physical infrastructure and a functional system for the identification and protection of refugees.
Edmund Rice Centre director Phil Glendenning says the report goes to a clear fundamental point, and that is “refugees require protection, asylum-seekers require protection not punishment”.
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