Unless we do something about the UN Convention on Refugees, we won’t stop the boats.

By Gary Scarrabelotti

Scarra Blog has argued regularly here that Australia needs to rescind its adhesion to the 1951 UN Convention of Refugees (including its 1967 Protocol which updated the Convention). 

In our post Global good guy in want of survival skills, we wrote: 

“The convention was made by the European peoples for Europeans displaced in an inter-European war; and they did so by opening wider to their displaced kith and kin already well-trodden pathways of migration from old Europe into the extended world of European culture, principally into North America, but also into farther flung Australia which, until then, had not experienced large-scale migration from The Continent. 

“The circumstances and motives which led to the Convention bear little relationship to the refugee problems we face today.  Our neighbours know it; but the penny has yet to drop for us.  A post-war inter-European agreement for a managed “internal” migration of refugees is not a pattern for dealing with extra-European people movements, all the more so in a world where they have become globalised, opportunistic, criminalised, and driven by economic aspirations more than by fears of persecution.”

As so often, Scarra Blog is ahead of the pack.  Today we see signs that the pack is catching up.

Obviously, we have not been out in front all on our own. Far from it. There have been a handful of honorable thought-leaders on the question of refugee policy and the role of the UN Convention.  And, I shouldn’t fail to mention what I guess is the overwhelming majority of Australians who are, as a matter of course, excluded from public discussion on immigration and refugee policy.  

Thought leaders

Anyway, the standout figures in this debate include Mirko Bagaric, Professor of Law and head of School at Deakin University; Peter Faris QC, a Melbourne barrister and media commentator; and Professor Bob Birrell of Monash University, former head of the Centre for Population and Urban Research. All of these are people who support a strong immigration policy for Australia and a refugee policy that actually helps real refugees.

What’s really interesting is that today, at last, the issue has hit the front page of The Australian — care of Greg Sheridan, another vigorous supporter of strong immigration and generous refugee policies. 

Furthermore, Sheridan leads his report with news that Gerry Hand, a former Labor Immigration Minister from 1990 to 1993, has publicly joined the ranks of those who are critiquing the UN refugee convention.  This is quite a development in the immigration-refugee policy debate in Australia.

Front page

Here is how Sheridan reported the state-of-play: 

Former Labor immigration minister Gerry Hand says Australia needs to rethink its commitment to the UN Refugee Convention, arguing that it is contributing to a “disaster” in refugee and border protection policies.

Mr Hand, who as immigration minister in the early 1990s introduced Australia’s system of mandatory detention of asylum-seekers, said the convention was not working for Australia and needed revision.

“The way it is now, unless you do something about the refugee convention, you won’t resolve the situation,” Mr Hand said.

“I just think it’s a disaster all round — a humanitarian tragedy, a disaster for the nation, a disaster for the people in camps,” Mr Hand told The Australian. The people in camps, he said, have less chance of resettlement because their places are being taken by illegal arrivals in boats.

“We just can’t afford to spend billions on this while we can’t deliver basic services to Australians,” he said.

The people in camps have less chance of resettlement because their places are being taken by illegal arrivals in boats.

The flood of illegal maritime arrivals in Australia’s north has led Monash University professor Bob Birrell, formerly head of the Centre for Population and Urban Research, to renew his call for Australia to withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention.

“The refugee convention is acting as a magnet to attract people here and we are spending billions on the problem, which we could spend on real refugees,” Professor Birrell told The Australian.

He believes Australia should make a contribution to resettling about 13,000 refugees a year, which was the level before the government recently raised it to 20,000, and is the level to which Tony Abbott’s opposition is committed.

However, Professor Birrell believes these should all be taken from offshore refugee camps and that there should be no availability for permanent resettlement for people who arrive illegally in Australia by boat.

Australia dudded

The really important bit of Sheridan’s report is supplied by Neil James, executive director of the Australian Defence Association. James explains how illegal asylum seekers are subverting Australian refugee policy and border controls by exploiting a massive loophole in the Convention itself:

Neil James … has written a paper on strategic considerations on asylum-seeker policy in which he says Australia may have to consider suspending its operational membership of the convention until the rest of the region signs up to the convention. In all of Southeast Asia, only Cambodia, East Timor and The Philippines are signatories.

This allows asylum claimants in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to ignore convention signatory nations near their borders and come to Australia without going through another country which has signed the refugee convention. On a technicality, this allows them to claim they have not passed through another country that would evaluate and recognise their refugee status.

The Australian has also obtained a detailed, written review of the process by a former senior immigration officer. The officer wrote: “Having made many decisions based on the refugee convention, I feel it is an increasingly outdated document that does not reflect the real world of the last 25 or 30 years.

“For many years, refugee decision-making in this country appeared to take place in a vacuum divorced from Australia’s national interests (and this is in fact in line with the refugee convention). If the convention was fully observed, there would be no limits to the thousands, or indeed millions, who could land on a convention signatory’s shores and claim asylum.

“In a world where the illegal movement of people is likely to increasingly become a major problem for all developed countries, the refugee convention appears increasingly at odds with our national interest, and indeed could be seen as encouraging people to enter Western countries by whatever means possible.”

And, the telling coda to Sheridan’s article:

“The range of people who conclude that the refugee convention was a creator of problems rather than their solution indicates the convention is in crisis. It also explains why no new nations in Southeast Asia are likely to sign it.”