Australia’s practice and history of detention both offshore and onshore has been criticised globally. It breaches international law and is a mist-just violation of human rights. Australia’s detention policies are considered some of the harshest in the world and cause incredible suffering for those detained.
Throughout this Life Inside series I will investigate a number of different areas regarding Australia’s detention system, including interviews with individuals inside detention, fact checking and analysis of laws among other topics. The main purpose of this series is to show the severity of this cruel and in just system.
History of Detention:
In 1992 Australia created the policy of ‘mandatory’ detention as a response to people arriving from Cambodia by boat. Before this policy there were large numbers of refugees fleeing to Australia due to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, then President Malcolm Fraser helped resettle thousands of Vietnamese refugees. However, it was the Labor Government who introduce laws in 1992 to detain refugees.
The 1992 legislation gave power to the Federal Parliament can detain refugees and do so without scrutiny of the High Courts. This legislation is completely undemocratic. Since 1992 Australia’s policy of Federal Parliament power hasn’t changed.
Since 2012 any person who arrives in Australia by boat without a valid visa has been moved to Manus Island or Nauru for processing. From 2013 Australian governments have explicitly stated that no refugees will ever be resettled from Nauru or PNG into Australia. There is a particularly chilling video of Scott Morrison speaking directly to refugees, saying they will never be resettled in Australia. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4xSan_4M48
The Morality of Australia’s Detention Policy:
After the Second World War the United Nations drafter the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as The Refugee Convention.
Under the Convention, a refugee can be classified as a person who is:
- Outside their own country and
- Has a well-founded fear of being persecuted due to his/her race, religion, political opinion, nationality, being a member of a particular social group, and is
- Unable or unwilling to return
Australia signed and ratified the Convention, meaning as a country we are obliged to help refugees who are displaced due to fear of persecution.
The Convention has no basis of transportation that determines a refugee, that means regardless of the method of arrival whether it be a plane of a boat, a refugee status is given to anyone fleeing their own country in fear of persecution.
By keeping refugees indefinitely detained, Australia is failing to uphold the promise to assist refugees, which we agreed to do by signing the convention. It is an act of violating international law.