UN refugee convention is decades out of date

February 1, 2012

West Australian, Page: 22
By Paul Murray
Wednesday, 1 February 2012


One of the nagging problems many if not most Australians have with the $1 billion-a-year asylum seeker racket based on clandestine boat trips from Indonesia is knowing the people who arrive are not the world’s most needy refugees.

They are just the wealthiest. They can afford to fly halfway around the world to Jakarta, bribe officials if necessary and pay the people smugglers.

When you consider the risks they take, they may also be the most foolhardy Poor refugees sitting in camps around the world can’t afford to gamble their lives, so they have to join the queue if they can find it.

On Saturday this column addressed the question of Indonesia’s culpability for the growing numbers of people who arrive at its borders and are tacitly helped to continue their journey to Australia. Indonesia’s visa requirements, purportedly strict for most of the people headed in our direction, are routinely flouted.

Saturday’s column argued that Indonesia makes no attempt to determine the bona fides of arrivals from Iraq, Iran, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan the bulk of our asylum claimants.

As I pointed out, Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 United Nations refugee convention, has no responsibility to accept anyone claiming asylum at its borders and is completely at liberty to put any suspicious arrivals back on the next plane to their departure point.

Over 60 years, the refugee convention has been bent out of shape to the extent that people who are often economic migrants or have a domestic political grudge can force their way into Australia and other wealthy countries that are bound by it.

Researcher Adrienne Milibank wrote a seminal issues paper for the Australian Parliamentary Library back in 2000 arguing that the convention was broken because changed international circumstances since World War II meant it no longer served its intended purpose.

More money is now spent trying to keep asylum seekers out of First World countries than helping genuine refugees trapped in camps or resettling them.

Ms Millbank said it was unlikely that many governments would sign the convention today and boldly noted that there were no practical obstacles to any signatory withdrawing.

Article 44 (2) states that any contracting state can denounce or withdraw, with one year’s notice," Ms Millbank wrote.

"No state has ever withdrawn. The threat of instant international pariah status is however less compelling at a time when the asylum system is widely seen as broken’.

Australia’s credentials on refugees and managed migration are unsurpassed, and it has played above its demographic weight on migration and refugee issues." Even though the document came at the height of the Howard government’s powe~ fresh from the then prime minister’s triumph at the republican referendum the year before and backed by his successes with the GST and East Timor, it never led to serious questioning of the refugee convention.

A decade 1ater~ Ms Milibank is stifi arguing her case from an unlikely base in the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University Her central thesis is that the convention is rooted in the needs of post-war Europe and is based on the notion of exile, a Cold War reality What makes it unsuitable to today’s refugee flows, sparked mainly by transitory civil wars, is that it has at its core a principle of non-return, not an obligation to protect refugees and then help them go home as soon as possible.

"Decisions regarding the genuineness of a claim for asylum are subjective and made on a benefit-of-the-doubt basis," Ms Millbank wrote in Monash University’s People and Place.

"Vast discrepancies between countries and adjudicators make a mockery of government claims to administer rigorous, consistent and fair processing." Afghanistan produced most of the world’s refugee claims in 2009 and the acceptance rate in Australia was 100 per cent. It was 20 per cent in Germany 13 per cent in Sweden, 3 per cent in the Netherlands and zero in Greece.

After Australia suspended processing for six months the following yea~ our recognition rate peculiarly fell to 50 per cent with no change in the Afghanistan crisis. But as the researcher points out, this clear evidence that the convention is broken doesn’t matter. And that’s because once an asylum seeker lands in the country they have chosen, they rarely leave.

"Of the over 10,000 asylum seekers who have reached Australia by boat since late 2008, 181 have returned home," Ms Millbank wrote. "Out of the 4500 from Afghanistan, two have returned." No wonder many Australians think the refugee convention sustains a rort.

The Gillard Government would save itself considerable pain by withdrawing.

Paul Murray presents 6PR the morning program on 882 6PR

Caption Text:
Risky expense: Asylum seekers under escort.