(no subject)

You Are What You Tweet: why not to get into fights on the Intersplat.

Asylum Seekers and travel documents

Tony Abbott on the Opposition's proposed asylum seeker policy:

...there will be a presumption where boat people destroy their identity documents that they will be denied refugee status.

This policy seems to be based on the assumption that if an asylum seeker can't produce their papers, then they're not really a refugee, and are trying to hoodwink the authorities¹. Is this assumption correct? I promised myself I wouldn't post anything about this until I actually had an answer. Now I do, thanks to the report of a 2003 Senate inquiry:

http://www.unhcr.org.au/pdfs/FRIdentAuthBill.pdf

The relevant bit, "The Bill and protection visas", starts at point 4.33 on page 20.

Briefly, the Victorian Bar was extremely critical of a proposal similar to Mr Abbott's:

"There are plenty of examples of people who are unable to obtain documentation in their country, given its lack of sophistication, who flee conditions of persecution in anonymous circumstances by design or who employ fraudulent documentation because they are fleeing persecution."

DIMIA responded that their proposed new law was only intended to make sure they could photograph or fingerprint asylum seekers without ID, not to exclude refugees who couldn't get ID, or couldn't use it. The Committee recommended it redraft the law to make that clear.

So Mr Abbott's proposal is based on an incorrect assumption²: we can't assume that an ID-less asylum seeker is a fake trying to fool us and should be rejected. In fact, they might lack ID because they're a refugee.

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¹ I think we have to assume that this policy would apply to any boat arrival who lacks ID, since there'd be no way of determining if they had deliberately destroyed their papers.

². I think we also have to assume that his aim is not to return genuine refugees to torture, murder, or persecution, just because they're slowing down the bureaucratic process. That would just be Kafkaesque.