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What a stinking story of inhumanity. A country intent on sending asylum seekers to one whose residents have actually applied for asylum and sanctuary in other states. But the UK-Rwanda deal, having stalled and stuttered before various courts and found wanting for reasons of human rights, has become law with the passage of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill.
The story of this deal has been a long one. On April 14, 2022, the government of Boris Johnson announced the Asylum Partnership Arrangement with Rwanda, which was intended “to contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated and unlawful cross border migration by establishing a bilateral asylum partnership”. Rwanda, for a princely sum, would receive those whose asylum claims would be otherwise processed in the UK through the “Rwanda domestic asylum system” and have the responsibility for settling and protecting applicants.
This cynical effort of deferring human rights obligations and not guarding asylum seekers and refugees from harm has been made all the more hideous by Kigali’s less than savoury reputation in the field. Refugees have been shot for protesting over reduced food rations (twelve from the Democratic Republic of Congo died in February 2018). Refugees have also been arrested for allegedly spreading misinformation about Rwanda’s less than spotless human rights record. And that’s just a smidgen of a significantly blotted copybook.
Notwithstanding this, UK home secretaries have gushed over Kigali’s seemingly falsified credentials. Suella Braverman, who formerly occupied the post, was jaw dropping in her claim that “Rwanda has a track record of successfully resettling and integrating people who are refugees or asylum seekers”. This is markedly ironic given that the Rwandan government has been accused of creating its own complement of refugees running into the tens of thousands.
The UK government has a patchy legal record in trying to defend the legitimacy of the exchange with Rwanda. The Court of Appeal in June 2023 reversed a lower court decision on the grounds that those asylum seekers sent to Rwanda faced real risks of mistreatment prohibited by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Rwanda, it was noted, was “intolerant of dissent; that there are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech; and that political opponents have been detained in unofficial detention centres and have been subjected to torture and Article 3 ill-treatment short of torture.”
The government also failed to convince the UK Supreme Court, which similarly found in November 2023 that people removed to Rwanda faced a real risk of being returned to their countries of origin in violation of the principle of non-refoulement. That principle, by which persons are not to be sent to their countries of origin or third countries if they would be placed at risk of harm, is a cardinal rule in several instruments of international law and enshrined in British law.
In what can only be regarded as a legal absurdity, the Safety of Rwanda bill essentially directs the home secretary, immigration officials, courts and tribunals to deem Rwanda a safe country in accordance with UK law and UK obligations to protect asylum seekers. It also bars decision makers from considering the risk of refugees being sent by Rwanda to other countries and disallows UK courts from drawing upon interpretations of international law, including the European Convention of Human Rights. Effectively, a sizeable portion of the UK’s own Human Rights Act 1998 has been rendered inconsequential in these determinations.
A final, nasty feature of the legislation is the grant of power to a Minister of the Crown to decide whether to abide by interim measures made by the European Court of Human Rights regarding any removal to Rwanda. This is astonishing on several levels, not least because it repudiates the binding nature of such interim measures.
Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, could barely believe the passage of such an obnoxious bit of legislation. Not only did it fly in the face of obligations to protect refugees, it constituted a direct interference in the judicial process. “The United Kingdom government should refrain from removing people under the Rwanda policy and reverse the Bill’s effective infringement of judicial independence.”
Shadowing these proceedings is an unmistakable, ghoulish legacy of Australian origin. The former Home Secretary Priti Patel openly acknowledged that elements of the “Australian model” of processing asylum claims in third countries were appealing and something to emulate. The particularly attractive element of the plan was the refusal by Canberra to ever permit those found to be refugees to ever settle on Australian soil. Other countries, including such European states as Denmark, have also chosen Rwanda as an appropriate destination for unwanted asylum seekers.
The entire affair is a stunning example of political entropy, a howl from an administration marching before the firing squad. With each failure, the Tories have tried to claw back respectability in the hope of appearing muscular in the face of irregular migration. They have accordingly cooked up a scheme that is not merely cruel, but one of staggering cost (each asylum seeker of the current cohort promises to cost the British taxpayer £1.8 million) and ineffectualness. Sunak, a laughably weak and unpopular prime minister, is, politically speaking, at death’s door. Despite getting the legislation through, legal struggles from potential deportees are bound to tear into the arrangements. What Britain’s judges do will prove a true test of character.
The post When Safety is a Fiction: Passing the UK’s Rwanda Bill first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by ProPublica.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by ProPublica.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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In a recent interview with Spanish-language cable network Univision that aired on Tuesday, President Joe Biden suggested that he would soon issue an executive order using the same authority former President Donald Trump used to enact racist immigration policies. Lamenting that thousands of migrants are seeking asylum in the U.S. daily under current policy, Biden said during the interview that he…
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Hasan*, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has spent all but one of his 24 years of life in the United Kingdom. He does not speak Hebrew or Arabic fluently, and depends on British medical care. In 2019, Hasan was informed that he was to be deported to Israel, separating him from his family in the U.K., so he filed an asylum claim. In 2022, that claim was denied, forcing him to appeal.
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After four months in limbo about his refugee status and heavily in debt, Hung has some advice for anyone from Vietnam planning to work in Australia on a tourist visa:
“If you are keen on coming to Australia, you’d better choose a legal way,” said the part-time laborer from Hanoi, who was duped into paying an immigration service company to apply for an entry visa on his behalf.
“Arriving with a student or skilled labor visa is OK, but you should think twice about using a tourist visa,” he said.
For years, Hung made ends meet in Hanoi on a monthly income of 10 million dong (US$400), but was unable to build any savings due to the high cost of living in Vietnam’s capital.
After hearing stories of other Vietnamese landing good-paying jobs while visiting Australia, Hung, who spoke to RFA Vietnamese using a pseudonym due to security concerns, decided to travel the 5,000-odd kilometers (3,100 miles) southeast to try his luck.
He hoped to earn a better salary Down Under – where minimum wage workers earn AU$70,000 (US$48,000) a year, or 14 times the average income in Vietnam – and save money to improve his living standard back home.
Vietnamese who are unable to obtain work visas for Australia are eligible for a Work and Holiday Visa, which allows people to work while traveling in the country for up to one year.
Applicants must be between the ages of 18 and 30, have no criminal record and provide evidence that they have completed at least two years of undergraduate study. They must also show that they can support themselves financially while in Australia and have attained a certain level of English proficiency.
In debt and desperate
Hung, who did not disclose his age, had no employer to sponsor a work visa and was unable to meet either the education or English proficiency requirements for a Work and Holiday Visa. But a Vietnamese immigration services company told him that he could legally work in Australia as a tourist.
Australian tourist visas have a significantly lower barrier to obtain. They are good for three months and can be extended to a full year in special circumstances. However, entrants are not eligible to work during their visit.
Unfamiliar with the application process, Hung took on debt to pay 100 million dong (US$4,000) – a substantial amount for the average Vietnamese laborer – to the immigration services company to handle his visa, as well as purchase an airline ticket, and he flew to Australia in July 2023.
Hung had hoped to live and work in Australia for up to two years, to pay off what he had borrowed in getting there and to build wealth. Instead, by October, his tourist visa was about to expire and he had only accrued more debt while supporting himself for three months in a nation with a vastly higher cost of living.
Increasingly desperate, Hung sought help from fellow Vietnamese through social media, and was advised to apply for an Australian Onshore Protection Visa (Subclass 866) as a political refugee, which would allow him to stay in Australia for longer and work legally.
He paid someone AU$1,000 (US$650) to prepare his application, went to the local immigration department to be fingerprinted, and was granted a bridging visa (BVE 050) that allows him to lawfully reside in the country while awaiting a decision on his status.
While Hung will be required to present evidence of his asylum claim, it is unclear when he will be called for an interview, due to the large backlog of applications.
Topping the list for asylum seekers
According to the Australian Department of Home Affairs, 2,905 Vietnamese nationals applied for the Australian Onshore Protection Visa in 2023, making them the largest ethnic group to do so and accounting for 12% of the total number of applicants.
Vietnamese topped the list of asylum applicants in Australia, beating out Indians and Chinese, in each of the last five months of 2023, and ranked second in three other months last year.
Thai officers talk to Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee and asylum seekers in Bangkok, Aug. 28, 2018 after rounding up more than 160 who are believed to be at risk of persecution if they are returned to their homelands. Refugee applications to the Australian Embassy in Vietnam, also sent from Thailand and Australia, tend to increase after political upheavals, says one immigration attorney. (AP) Many of them end up in situations like Hung’s, nervously awaiting a verdict on their claim to learn whether they will be granted residential status or forced to return home.
The bridging visa does not expire and grants holders the right to work and access a national health insurance assistance program so that they can receive medical care in Australia.
However, if asylum status is denied, the bridging visa will be automatically canceled within 28 days, and the holder will be required to leave the country. Those denied status have the right to appeal the decision with an immigration court.
The chances of being awarded political asylum in Australia are fairly low. In 2023, the Australian Department of Home Affairs processed nearly 1,000 asylum applications, of which only 53, or 5.6%, were approved.
The stakes are considerably higher for applicants who have fled persecution in Vietnam, where the one-party communist state brooks no dissent. Being forced to return home can often mean a jail sentence, or worse.
‘Extraordinary surge’ in applications
Vietnamese-Australian immigration attorney Le Duc Minh told RFA that his law firm has helped many “genuine” Vietnamese political asylum seekers successfully apply for status in Australia.
But he acknowledged that he regularly hears stories like Hung’s from people who ended up in debt after trying to work illegally in the country.
“Some people simply ask me, ‘Please find a way for me to stay longer to earn money and pay off my debts. I borrowed hundreds of millions of dong in Vietnam to make this trip. I cannot go home empty-handed,’” he said.
Minh said he was surprised by what he called an “extraordinary surge” in applications by Vietnamese for political asylum in Australia in the second half of 2023.
He said that refugee applications tend to increase after political upheavals or government crackdowns on rights activists, but described last year as “very politically stable” in Vietnam. There were no mass demonstrations and most of the arrests were only of prominent activists and outspoken individuals on social media.
Instead, Minh posited, last year’s surge was likely the result of “large-scale fraudulent activities” in Vietnam, including individuals and companies providing false information about work opportunities for foreigners in Australia in order to sell them forged documents and useless services.
He cited an advertisement from one company claiming that applicants could take advantage of a program in Australia that would allow them to “take agricultural jobs without any expertise or English skills.”
After arriving in Australia only to learn that they would be unable to work or pay off their debts, most feel that they have no other choice but to double down, with applying for political asylum as their only option to stay in the country.
Supporting legitimate claims
Immigration attorney Kate Hoang, the former president of Australia’s Vietnamese community, stressed that “not all asylum applicants [from Vietnam] are those who want to extend their stay.”
Many, she said, were targeted by Vietnam’s government for speaking out about social injustices and were lucky just to have been able to travel to Australia to seek asylum at all.
Hoang urged the Australian government to make changes to the way it processes asylum visas to prevent those without legitimate claims from exploiting the system.
Meanwhile, Hung’s future remains uncertain as he awaits the ruling on his asylum application, and he has come to regret his journey to the southern continent.
“I paid a huge amount of money to come here, so I now have no choice but to work hard to pay off my debts, and I’ll probably just have to return home with nothing to show for it,” he said. “If I could make the decision again, I would never have gone.”
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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A Cambodian opposition activist released from prison last year after apologizing to then-Prime Minister Hun Sen and joining his ruling party has repudiated his defection after arriving in a “safe” third country.
Voeun Veasna, a forestry activist and former broadcaster for the online television station of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, was released in May 2023 after joining the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and apologizing to Hun Sen for a derisive poem he wrote about him.
The activist then fled to neighboring Thailand – where he was initially arrested in November 2021 following a request from Hun Sen – and filed a claim with the U.N. refugee agency as an asylum seeker.
He told Radio Free Asia in an interview that he could repudiate the decision to defect to the ruling CPP now that he was in a “safe” third country, which he declined to disclose for security reasons.
“I can’t live with communist leaders, and I can’t betray my conscience. I must resign,” Voeun Veasna said, referring to the CPP’s origins as the sole party of Cambodia’s 1980s revolutionary communist regime.
Voeun Veasna added that he had only exercised his freedom of speech and should not have been jailed in the first place.
“I was talking about how Cambodians’ living standards are not getting better like neighboring countries,” he said. “I was imprisoned unjustly.”
CPP spokesman Sok Eysan said he didn’t care about Voeun Veasna’s decision to repudiate his defection after fleeing from Cambodia.
“The CPP doesn’t need convicts to join the ruling party in order to evade prison terms,” the ruling party spokesman said.
Voeun Veasna’s announcement follows the arrest last month of prominent opposition activist Kong Raiya, who also publicly defected to the ruling party to avoid political persecution but then reneged.
Unlike Voeun Veasna, Kong Raiya revealed his decision to leave the CPP while in Thailand, and was arrested there last month before a visit by Prime Minister Hun Manet, who succeeded his father last year.
Another arrest
Separately, the Nation Power Party, a new opposition party founded in the wake of the barring of the Candlelight Party – itself a successor to the banned CNRP – from last year’s national election released a statement slamming the arrest of one of its electoral candidates, Meu Seanghor.
Meu Seanghor, also known as Kea Visal, had planned to be a candidate for the upcoming elections for Cambodia’s provincial and district administrative councils, according to the party, but was arrested on Friday in Kampong Cham province on charges of “incitement.”
The opposition party said his arrest was “an act of intimidation” and would “provoke a gloomy environment” for the May 26 council elections, in which only those already directly elected by the public to Cambodia’s 1,652 commune councils are allowed to vote.
Meu Seanghor’s wife said he was “pushed into a car” and taken away by police, and said she believed the arrest was politically motivated.
RFA reached out to Chhun Srun, the chief of Kampong Cham’s Baray commune, where he was arrested, but he could not be reached.
Translated by Yun Samean for RFA Khmer. Edited by Alex Willemyns and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Lorenzo Tondo in Palermo reported in the Guardian of 22 February 2024 that people and groups who assist asylum seekers are reporting a disturbing trend of escalating intimidation, with aid workers facing direct threats including being held at gunpoint and having their phone communications monitored by government authorities, according to a report from the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights.
Dunja Mijatović has warned of increasing harassment and in some cases criminalisation of people and groups who assist refugees, especially in Hungary, Greece, Lithuania, Italy, Croatia and Poland. [see e.g. https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/11/17/greeces-mistaken-deterrence-migrants-and-aid-workers-facing-heavy-prison-sentences/ and https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/10/09/mary-lawlor-condemns-criminalization-of-those-saving-lives-in-the-mediterranean/]
“Organisations and people assisting refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants have been subjected to beatings, had their vehicles or equipment destroyed, or have been targeted by vandalism of their property, and even by arson or bomb attacks,” she wrote.
A recent example was the bombing on 5 January of the office of Kisa, an NGO assisting refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Cyprus. [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2024/01/19/attack-against-cypriot-anti-racism-ngo-kisa/]
Mijatović said she had observed in certain member states how authorities had engaged with human rights defenders in an aggressive or intimidating manner. During the humanitarian crisis at the Poland-Belarus border, thousands of refugees from the Middle East were offered a route by the Lukashenko regime to try to reach the EU from Belarus, highlighting the restrictions by Poland on access to the border zone for people and organisations providing humanitarian assistance and legal aid.
The commissioner noted how “the emergence of an approach in which migration issues are increasingly addressed by member states from a security perspective” had led to the building of fences and deployment of military personnel, equipment and surveillance in border areas that has also affected NGOs.
“These physical obstacles deny asylum seekers the chance to seek protection and the right to a fair and efficient asylum procedure [and] this approach has also created an extremely difficult environment for human rights defenders,” she wrote.
“Those who assist refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants may be seen by states as an obstacle to the implementation of asylum and migration policies focused on deterrence and security, and therefore are faced with hostility. The rolling back of human rights, which is often part of states’ policies in this area, also leads to measures explicitly or implicitly targeting those helping.”
NGO rescue boats have also faced violence, including the use of firearms, from non-European countries with which Council of Europe member states cooperate on external migration control. NGO workers on some of these vessels have documented how often the Libyan coastguard has fired gunshots and endangered crew members and people in distress in the central Mediterranean. [see e.g. https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/12/18/international-migrants-day-the-story-of-the-ocean-viking/]
Mijatović also noted the growing use of surveillance technologies. “During discussions for the preparation of this document concerns were raised that, in some member states, pervasive surveillance activities created mounting challenges for human rights defenders, including lawyers and journalists,” she wrote.
“Governments, in the name of national security concerns, often employ advanced surveillance tools to intercept communications and monitor online activities, including human rights defenders’ social media.”
In 2022, the Greek journalists Thanasis Koukakis and Stavros Malichudis were allegedly targeted for investigating sensitive topics such as financial crime cases and migration. The Italian justice minister in 2021 dispatched inspectors to Sicily after revelations that prosecutors had intercepted hundreds of telephone conversations involving no fewer than 15 journalists and covering migration issues and aid workers in the central Mediterranean.
Mijatović wrote: “Invasive surveillance practices, whether through physical surveillance, phone and internet tapping or by using spyware not only infringes on the personal security and privacy of individual human rights defenders, but also threaten the confidentiality between human rights defenders and the refugees, asylum seekers and migrants they assist, which is often crucial to working effectively.”
She added that people helping refugees, asylum seekers and migrants often experience extremely high levels of online hate and even death threats. Human rights defenders who are themselves refugees or from an ethnic minority background may also receive racist abuse, online and offline.
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
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Militarized borders — comprising walls, barriers, fences and repressive border policies — have become something of the norm in today’s world, which otherwise is in favor of the free movement of goods and capital. But that wasn’t always the case. The United States, for example, had no federal immigration laws during the first century of its existence. There are strong moral…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In 2019, I stood outside a for-profit child migrant jail in the city of Homestead, Florida. I was watching then-presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris speak out against the facility, initially opened under the Obama administration and reopened under former President Donald Trump. “It’s a human rights abuse being committed by the United States government,” Harris said at the time…
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Republicans in the Arizona state legislature have advanced a bill that would grant property owners the right to shoot and kill anyone who trespasses on their property, so long as they claim they were doing so in self-defense. House Bill 2843 expands the state’s current “Castle Doctrine” law. That statute allows individuals to shoot and kill any person who breaks into their home.
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If only we could say that Peter Dutton, Australia’s federal opposition leader and curator of bigoted leanings, was unusual in assuming that granting humanitarian visas to Palestinians might be problematic. But both he, and his skew-eyed spokesman on home affairs, James Patterson, have concluded that votes are in the offing. Refugees may be accepted from the Ukrainian-Russian War, as long as they are Ukrainian, but anything so much as a whiff of a Palestinian fleeing the Israel-Hamas conflict is bound to be concerning. Ukrainians are noble victims; the latter might be terrorist sympathisers or Hamas militants.
This view started being floated in November last year, when Dutton began warning the public that visitor visas for Palestinians could result in a calamity. (At that point, 860 visas had been issued to Palestinians.) “The inadequacy of these checks could result in a catastrophic outcome in our country,” he foamed. “Taking people out of a war zone without conducting the checks, particularly those that are available to us in the US, is reckless.”
No concern was voiced about the possibility that Israelis, who had also been offered 1,793 visas, might pose a problem to the heavenly idyll of Australian security. It is also worth mentioning that Dutton, when home affairs minister, approved over 500 visas a week to Syrians fleeing the civil war. Ditto the granting of 5,000 visas to Afghans the month the Taliban resumed control of Kabul in the aftermath of retreating Western armies.
Dutton’s arithmetic is that of the typical copper: simple, direct, amateurish. Among the Palestinians, “one person, or could be 10 people, I don’t know” might be of concern. His concerns are feverishly listed: “Have interviews been conducted, do we know people’s ideologies, do we know their interest in the west, why they want to come to Australia.” This template would be applicable to every group of visitors or migrants seeking to come to Australia at any one point. No one is likely to say on their visa application: “I come to see your new country and hope to commit atrocities.”
Given the number of conflict zones on Planet Earth, Dutton was offering an obtuse statement calculated to boost flagging popularity. It was also timed within a matter of hours after the declaration of a four-day ceasefire in Gaza. While proving, at times, sketchy in her role as Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil was close to the mark in stating that, “Dutton is a reckless politician who will do and say anything to score political points – even if it puts the national security of Australians at risk.”
But Dutton did not want to be dismissed as a paranoid former police officer who sees criminals everywhere and innocence as a constipated afterthought. “The prime minister here needs to hit the pause button – I’m not saying people shouldn’t come at some point – but people should come when all the checks are conducted.”
Again, a strange sentiment, given that visa applicants tend to face a series of tests that are more demanding than most when seeking to visit the Down Under Paradise where perfection is assumed. “If a visa applicant is assessed as posing a risk to the health, safety or good order of the Australian community, their visa may be considered for refusal,” were the dull words of a government spokesperson.
With the arrival of irregular migrants on the shores of Western Australia this month, cockeyed bigotry again assumed its role on the podium of Australian politics. Seeking to tie the arrivals as connected with shoddy security credentials, the opposition fanned out the implications of granting up to 2,000 visas for Palestinians, a fact seen as particularly galling to the shadow home affairs minister. “In the middle of an unprecedented antisemitism crisis, the government should be taking much greater care in granting visas to people from a war zone run by a terrorist organisation,” bleated Patterson. “How can they possibly assure themselves there is not one Hamas supporter among them? And how will it help social cohesion if they manage to slip through?”
By this logic, no one should ever leave a war zone, an area of devastation, a territory blighted by terror. You just might be a regime supporter, a sympathiser, despite suffering possible harm, even death. But there is an inadvertent slant coming through in Patterson’s mangled world view: Palestinians, having been maimed, murdered and traumatised, might wish to take out their grievance on a foreign power, possibly one sympathetic to Israel. Ignore the survival imperative, the desire to find, rather than abandon, security; focus, instead, on the motivation for vengeance. Even this view suffers for one obvious point: those wishing to avenge their families and friends are bound to wish to stay in Gaza and the West Bank, rather than flee and plot from afar.
With the current arrivals from Gaza – some 340 or so have managed to drip themselves from the Palestinian territories – the bedwetting fantasies of terror being induced by the opposition seem absurd and callous. But absurdity is a proven calculus for electoral success – at least sometimes.
The post A Copper’s Skewed Logic: Politicising Palestinian Visas first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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A federal court in Washington, D.C., heard arguments Thursday in a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of racial discrimination and rights violations of Haitian asylum seekers. The suit was brought on behalf of 11 Haitian asylum seekers who were abused by U.S. border agents as more than 15,000 people, mostly from Haiti, were forced to stay in a makeshift border encampment on the banks of the Rio Grande near the Acuña-Del Rio International Bridge in Texas. One of the plaintiffs is Mirard Joseph, the asylum seeker whose image went viral after being photographed while a Border Patrol agent on horseback lashed him with split reins, grabbed his neck and gripped Joseph by the shirt collar. “This is a critical junction in our country here in the United States as we make sure to uphold human rights and understanding seeking asylum is a human right,” says Guerline Jozef, executive director of immigrant advocacy organization Haitian Bridge Alliance, which helped bring the case on behalf of asylum seekers. “We will continue to push forward and make sure that accountability is served but also we have systematic change in the way that we receive people in the United States.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The imaginative faculties of standard Australian politicians retreat to some strange, deathly place on certain issues. In that wasteland, they are often unrecoverable. Like juveniles demanding instant reward, these representatives find complexity hideous, troubling, discomforting. Focus on the prospect of immediate electoral gain, the crude punch, the bruising, the hurt. That, in sum, is Canberra’s policy towards refugees.
With this month’s appearance of 39 asylum seekers on some of the most remote shorelines on the planet in Western Australia, the customary wells of hysteria were again being tapped for political gain. “Here we go again,” lamented the Tasmanian Greens Senator Nick McKim. “A boat arrives with desperate refugees who need our help and we’re suddenly in a ‘political crisis’ because the media said so”.
One desperate politician was opposition leader Peter Dutton, who wondered how these dangerous subversives could have ever arrived undetected in the first place. “The government has all sorts of problems,” he crowed. “It’s clear that they don’t have the same surveillance in place that we had when we were in government.”
Dutton found it “inconceivable a boat of this size, carrying 40-plus people, could make it to the mainland without there being any detection.” The insinuation is hard to ignore: the Labor government permitted the arrival to take place.
The 2022-3 Australia Border Force annual report had noted a reduction of “maritime patrol days” by 6% and aerial patrols by 14%, the result of vessel maintenance, personnel shortages and logistical difficulties when operating in remote parts off the coast. Overall budgetary costs for the ABF have also been adjusted to account for the fact that the 2022-3 budget was, as Home Affairs department chief finance officer Stephanie Cargill explained in May year, “overspent”.
The ABF chief, Michael Outram, has even gone so far as to reproach Dutton for his assessment about funding cuts, which deceptively, even mendaciously suggest belt tightening on the part of the Albanese government. “Border Force funding is currently the highest it’s been since its establishment in 2015 and in the last year, the ABF has received additional funding totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, to support maritime and land based operations.”
All in all, there has hardly been a softening of the brutal policy that presumptively and prematurely judges undocumented naval arrivals as unworthy. As the ABF statement on the arrivals notes with customary severity, “Australia’s tough border protection policies means that no one who travels unauthorised by boat will ever be allowed to settle permanently in Australia. The only way to travel to Australia is legally, with an Australian visa.”
The dubious rationale for maintaining the policy, formally known as Operation Sovereign Borders, is still very much in place. “Austraia,” the ABF continues to explain, “remains committed to protecting its borders, stamping out people smuggling and preventing vulnerable people from risking their lives on futile journeys. The people smuggling business model is built on the exploitation of information and selling lies to vulnerable people who will give up everything to risk their lives at sea.”
Rear Admiral Brett Sonter, who leads Operation Sovereign Borders, had also stated that nothing has changed. “The mission of Operation Sovereign Borders remains the same today as it was when it was established in 2013: protect Australia’s borders, combat people smuggling in our region, and importantly, prevent people from risking their lives at sea.” To suggest otherwise would create an “alternative narrative” susceptible to exploitation “by criminal people smugglers to deceive potential irregular immigrants and convince them to risk their lives and travel to Australia by boat.”
This became a point of contention for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who decided to give Dutton a parliamentary scalding by suggesting that his opponents were “just full of nonsense, and they should stop being a cheer squad for people, encouraging people smuggling.”
Such “business models”, as they are derisively and demagogically called, are the natural consequence of a yearning to flee. It is a yearning that is being globally punished, notably by wealthier states less than keen to accept asylum seekers. Canberra’s savage approach to the problem – non-settlement in Australia of those eventually found to be refugees and detaining individuals in concentration camps in the Pacific – has become the envy of border protection fetishists. The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, for instance, dreams of an Australia-styled solution that will involve “turning the boats back” and deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Unfortunately for him, and most fortunately for humanitarians, an army of lawyers and judges have frustrated his vision.
The border fetishists also make a crucial omission. The people smugglers, who are of all stripes of opportunism and exploitation rather than some monolithic bloc, are merely facilitating the provisions of the United Nations Refugee Convention. All who arrive should not be discriminated against on the basis of how they arrive or their backgrounds – the articles of the Convention state as much – yet Australia’s border policy remains persistently cruel and defiant. Whenever a boat appears with a small cargo full of desperate individuals who make it to land, the fantasies of invasion, unwarranted intrusion and unwanted infiltration catch alight. It was high time they were snuffed out.
The post Border Paranoia in Fortress Australia first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Critics are condemning a proposal by a bipartisan group of U.S. senators that would overhaul the immigration system, noting that the bill would diminish the rights of asylum seekers. The bipartisan bill, introduced on Sunday by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona), Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), has been months in the making. In addition to implementing several…
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Three Chinese nationals who fled to Thailand in November and arrived at Taipei’s airport on Tuesday told Radio Free Asia they fear arrest if they return to Beijing and are planning to seek assistance from the Taiwanese government to move to a third country.
Tian Yongde, Wei Yani and Huang Xingxing all obtained United Nations temporary refugee cards in Bangkok after traveling there in November. All three arrived in Taiwan on a flight from Kuala Lumpur and had tickets to board another flight to Beijing.
But in an interview with RFA late Tuesday, Tian Yongde said the three were instead preparing to pass through a security checkpoint at Taoyuan Airport in order to stay in Taiwan.
“I hope the Taiwan government will give me some time and let me wait here,” he said. “Taiwan is recognized for its high quality, and it is safe and secure to wait for a U.S. visa in Taiwan.”
Tian, 52, said authorities began keeping tabs on him in 2005 when he visited the home of Zhao Ziyang, China’s former prime minister who was removed from power in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and kept under house arrest for 16 years.
After that, Tian was unable to work and was summoned by police many times for writing articles or participating in “group incidents.”
RFA was not immediately able to verify the account of Tian and his traveling companions, but they forwarded images of the identification cards provided to them by the U.N. refugee agency.
“I was arrested twice for ‘subversion of state power’ in 2009 and 2011,” Tian said. “The first time, I gave materials to petitioners, and I was said to be illegally holding state secrets.”
The other two people – 53-year-old Wei Yani and 17-year-old Huang Xingxing – are mother and son. They are unrelated to Tian, and only met him once they arrived in late November in Thailand. They eventually made plans to travel together.
‘Unsafe in Thailand’
Wei said she was imprisoned four times in China for a total of 10 years for petitioning for basic rights for herself and for friends. Authorities accused her of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” and “subverting state power,” she told RFA.
She said she had trouble finding work after she was released from prison in June, and also had one more criminal trial pending.
“So I borrowed money from others to apply for a refugee certificate with my son,” she told RFA. “I just want to be able to move on from here [Taiwan] through media appeals.”
Tian recorded a video at Taoyuan Airport in which he said he feels more safe in Taiwan than in Thailand, where authorities have recently sent a number of prominent activists and dissidents back to China.
“Hello everyone, I am Tian Yongde,” he said in the video. “Because I feel unsafe in Thailand, when I came to Taiwan, which feels relatively safe, my purpose is to go to the United States.”
Wei said she and her son will seek asylum in the United States or the Netherlands if they are allowed to stay in Taiwan. In the future, she would like to help Chinese people petition for complaints.
“I still have more things to do,” Wei said, referring to her previous work with writing and gathering petitions.
The Taiwan Immigration Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by RFA on the three Chinese nationals.
Edited by Chen Meihua, He Ping and Matt Reed.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Xia Xiaohua for RFA Mandarin.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Progressives on Saturday urged the U.S. President to halt his immigration-related appeals to “a voter who doesn’t exist” as he promised voters at a campaign event in South Carolina that he would immediately “shut down the border” between the U.S. and Mexico if Congress passes a bipartisan immigration bill. Senators are expected to release the legislative text of the bill this week…
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Republicans are aiming to erode legal immigration pathways as part of their latest attacks on immigration, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) warned this week as the White House negotiates an immigration deal with the GOP to prevent a government shutdown. On social media, Ocasio-Cortez highlighted a portion of a House Oversight Committee hearing on immigration from Wednesday…
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On September 22, 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it would begin paying growers to use the notorious H-2A contract foreign labor (or guestworker) program. Tapping into $65 million from the American Rescue Act, the USDA will pay between $25,000 and $2 million per application to defray the expenses of recruiting migrant workers from three Central American countries…
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As Senate leaders say President Biden will have to wait until next year to negotiate a deal with Republicans on immigration as part of an emergency funding package, the leading GOP presidential candidate doubled down on his hateful comments about immigrants that echoed Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. This comes as Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a major Trump supporter, approved a sweeping new law that…
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Across the globe, refugees, always treated as the pox of public policy, continue to feature in news reports describing anguish, despair and persistent persecution. If they are not facing barbed wire barriers in Europe, they are being conveyed, where possible, to third countries to be processed in lengthy fashion. Policy makers fiddle and cook the legal record to justify such measures, finding fault with instruments of international protection such as the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951.
A very dramatic example of roughing up and violence is taking place against Afghans in Pakistan, a country that, despite having a lengthy association with hosting refugees, has yet to ratify the primary Convention. Yet in March 2023, the UNHCR noted that Pakistan hosted 1.35 million registered refugees. The organisation praised Pakistan for its “long and commendable tradition of providing protection to refugees and asylum-seekers”, noting that the current number comprised “mainly Afghan refugees holding Proof of Registration (PoR), as well as a small number of non-Afghan refugees and asylum seekers from other countries such as Myanmar, Yemen, Somalia and Syria.”
Such a rosy assessment detracts from the complex nature of the status of Afghans in that country, characterised by, in some cases, the absence of visas and passports, the expiration of visas and the long wait for renewals. Then comes the tense, heavy mix of domestic politics.
On September 15, the federal government ordered all individual Afghans residing in the country illegally to leave the country by November 1 or face deportation. The order affects some 1.7 million Afghans residing in the country, though the figures on the undocumented vary with dizzy fluctuations.
It is proving disastrous for those vulnerable individuals who fled a country where the Taliban has returned to power. To date, 400,000 are said to have left Pakistan via border crossings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan, with one estimate from the International Rescue Committee suggesting that 10,000 are being returned to Afghanistan each day. These include the whole spectrum of vulnerable persons: women, girls, human rights activists, journalists and those formerly in the employ of the previous Western-backed government.
The picture is an ugly one indeed, complicated by Pakistan’s own domestic ills and complex relationship with Kabul. During the course of the vacuously named Global War on Terror, Afghanistan came to be seen as a problem for Pakistani security, its refugee camps accused as being incubators for fractious Afghan militants. Kabul, at that point yet to return to Taliban control, accused Islamabad of destabilising its own security by providing sanctuary for those very same militants. In the aftermath of the killing of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani in September 2011, the victim of a daring suicide attack on his residency, Pakistan’s then Foreign Minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, proved roundly dismissive: “We are not responsible if Afghan refugees crossed the border and entered Kabul, stayed in a guest house and attacked Professor Rabbani.”
The latest chapter of demonisation comes on the coattails of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Brutal night raids by police, featuring beatings, ominous threats and detention, have become the hallmarks of the expulsion campaign. The police forces, themselves spoiled by corruption and opportunism, are prone to pilfering property, including jewellery and livestock.
In October, Mir Ahmad Rauf, who heads the Afghan Refugees’ Council in Pakistan reported “widespread destruction of Afghan homes in Islamabad’s B-17, Karachi, and other parts of Pakistan.” Last month, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom issued a statement expressing concern at “reports of increased detainment, violence, and intimidation against the Ahmadiyya and Afghan refugee communities” in the country.
To add to this failure of protection is the status of many who, despite being Afghan, were born in Pakistan and never set foot in Afghanistan. In 2018, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Imran Khan announced that his government would be amenable to granting citizenship to Afghans born in the country. The promise (amenability is always contingent) was never enacted into law, and Khan is now persona non grata with Pakistan’s usurpers.
The protective, humanitarian burden for processing claims by Afghans in other countries has also been reluctantly shared. To return to Afghanistan spells potential repression and persecution; but to find a country in the European Union, or to seek sanctuary in the United States, Australia and others, has been nigh impossible for most.
When asylum has been considered, it has often been done with an emphasis on prioritising the contributions of men who had performed military and security roles in the previous Western-backed Kabul administration. There is a delicious irony to this, given the evangelical promises of US President George W. Bush to liberate the country’s women from the clutches of obscurantist fundamentalism.
On December 1, a three-member bench of the Pakistani Supreme Court sought responses from the various arms of the government, including the apex committee led by the Prime Minister, foreign office, and army chief on their decision to expel Afghan nationals. Given the caretaker status of the current government, which has all but outsourced foreign policy to the military, including the “Afghan issue”, legal questions can be asked.
One of the petitioners to the court, Senator Farhatullah Babar, states that current government members are technically unelected to represent the country. “So, the court would need to decide whether a caretaker government with such a restrictive mandate can take such a major policy decision, and in my view, this is beyond the power of the caretaker government.” Those Afghans remaining in Pakistan can only wait.
The post Banished from Pakistan: Islamabad Moves on Afghan Refugees first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Chinese dissident Chen Siming, who refused to board a flight to China while transiting through Taiwan, has been granted political asylum in Canada.
In an exclusive interview with Radio Free Asia after arriving in Vancouver on Oct. 5, Chen said he hopes to adapt to life in Canada as soon as possible and find a job to make a living. If he takes good care of himself, he said he will be more powerful to help the pro-democracy movement and overthrow the power of the Chinese Communist Party.
“After I got out of the airport [in Vancouver], I was very happy, my heart was at peace, and I was in the free world,” said Chen, an outspoken activist who recently published an open letter commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen massacre – a banned topic in China.
The Hunan province native fled from China in July to Laos, despite a travel ban imposed on him. He arrived in Laos just as the Chinese human rights lawyer Lu Siwei was detained by the local authorities, and was subsequently repatriated to China. A fearful Chen therefore headed to Bangkok, but remained concerned he would be arrested by Thai authorities who have previously sent Chinese political refugees back. So he bought a flight ticket for the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, routed through the democratic island of Taiwan on Sept. 22.
Chen remained under the care of Taiwan’s Immigration Department for more than 10 days at the airport in Taipei. A few days after arriving in Taoyuan airport, Taiwan’s New School for Democracy sent someone to check on his daily living needs and help him apply for a temporary entry permit as he awaited asylum in a third country.
At the same time, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees contacted him to help find a country that would officially accept him. Chen said he received backing from U.S. and Canada-based activists such as Sheng Xue, Jie Lijian and Wang Dan, which helped him arrive in Canada in a record 14 days.
While Chen felt uncertain about the future when staying in Taiwan, he was not worried. “The first is not to be deported to mainland China, and the second is not to be deported to Thailand. It doesn’t matter if the [waiting] time is longer. In Taiwan, I feel very safe, even in prison, let alone the immigration office.”
China’s long arm in Southeast Asia
Human rights lawyer Lu is now being held in the Xindu Detention Center in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan. He was repatriated to China in early September after being arrested in Laos en route to join his family in the United States.
His detention in Laos and subsequent repatriation is another example of transnational “long-arm” law enforcement by Beijing, rights activists and commentators have warned.
A number of prominent activists have also been sent back from Thailand to China, which has increased the pursuits of dissidents and peaceful activists even when they have fled overseas.
Chinese journalist Li Xin and human rights defender Tang Zhishun were kidnapped in Thailand and Myanmar respectively, while Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai was taken from his holiday home in Phuket, Thailand.
Another Chinese national, Wang Jianye, was executed after being extradited from Thailand in 1995 despite assurances that he wouldn’t face the death penalty.
And in July 2018, authorities in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing jailed rights activist Dong Guangping and political cartoonist Jiang Yefei after they were sent home from Thailand as they were awaiting resettlement as political refugees, prompting an international outcry.
Good news
Chen received the good news on Oct. 2 when Taiwanese authorities informed him in the morning that Canadian officials would come to him later with a Canadian visa. Despite his excitement, he also took to heart Canadian officials’ caution that he didn’t disclose the information to the outside world until he landed in Canada to avoid causing complications.
He arrived at Vancouver airport on the evening of Oct. 5, and the Immigrant Services Society of British Columbia immediately arranged for him to stay in a hotel. Chen was worried that he would not be able to pay.
When he learned that the bill would be taken care of, “I felt relieved and even more touched.” But he said that he isn’t wasting a minute even though he could relax.
Learning English. Credit: Fei Liu for RFA Apart from eating and sleeping, he spent most of the time reading the Bible and learning English. He wants to become stronger and contribute more to China’s democratic movement.
“The challenges I will face in the future are not small. For example, I need to learn English and find a job. I must first arrange my life. Only after these things are arranged can you participate in some democracy movement activities.”
Chen said that the tens of thousands of human rights fighters in China are in his mind, and he hopes that they can all work together, within and outside the wall to overthrow the totalitarian dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party.
“I hope our friends at home will take care of themselves first and wait for opportunities. We will do whatever we can abroad. Let’s work hard together for China’s freedom and democracy and the progress of China’s civilization.”
Chen also thanked the Taiwanese and Canadian governments, human rights organizations and pro-democracy activists.
Translated by Elaine Chan. Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Fei Liu for RFA Mandarin.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.This post was originally published on Radio Free.