Deported to Danger
Government's reckless treatment of rejected asylum seekers

Bob Briton

Last week a little more light was thrown on the secret processes 
used by the Federal Government to deport those asylum seekers 
rejected by its controversial assessment and review processes. 
The press carried details of Operation Long Haul, which had as 
its objective the removal of 31 detention centre detainees to 
several countries by staff of the Department of Immigration and 
Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) and contractors 
Australasian Correctional Management (ACM).

The detainees were considered to be of high risk of self-harm or 
attempting to escape — they were handcuffed, held with 
restraining belts and batons were kept at the ready. The flight 
in August 2001 included drop-offs at Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and 
Damascus with a final destination of Istanbul. Back in Australia, 
the then Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock commended the crew 
for completing the task in such a "professional manner".

The public might have assumed that to be the reality behind the 
deportation of those particular "illegal aliens" and the many 
others that get the thumbs down from the Commonwealth immigration 
authorities. However, the "operation" had been a nightmare. 
Tensions on the flight had been so high that its commander, Grant 
Cummins, had hit his second in command Bob Cork on the return 
journey. In Dubai, they had quarrelled when local officials 
became curious about the restraint equipment being carried.

It was only when Cork appealed his subsequent dismissal from the 
department to the NSW Industrial Relations Commission that the 
rest of us got additional insights into the Government's lawless 
deportation practices.

During the outbound flight Mr Cummins "encouraged" a dehydrated 
detainee to drink by holding his head and forcing a cup to his 
mouth. He ignored medical advice to perform the manoeuvre. In 
Istanbul the deportees were obliged to sit in the airport lounge 
before catching connecting flights when it turned out that 
holding cells were not available after all. A nurse working with 
the 34 contracted escort staff described the charter flight as 
dangerous.

Succession of Scandals

This was only the latest piece of bad press for the Federal 
Government with regard to its treatment of asylum seekers. Last 
month a whole study based on the treatment of 40 rejected asylum 
seekers was released.

The Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education and 
the School of Education of the Australian Catholic University 
conducted the survey during 2003 and 2004 in order to look into 
questions raised in another report — A Sanctuary Under Review 
— arising from a Senate Enquiry in 2000.

The questions the researchers probed in Deported to Danger 
were:

* Has the Australian Government or its agencies sent or attempted 
to send asylum seekers to unsafe places?

* Has the Australian Government or its agencies actually 
increased the dangers for rejected people by sending reports 
about them to overseas authorities?

* In managing removals, has the Australian Government or its 
agencies encouraged asylum seekers to obtain false papers, or 
become associated with bribery and corruption?

* Is the manner of conducting asylum seeker removals consistent 
with Australia's legal obligations?

* Is the manner of conducting asylum seeker removals consistent 
with Australia's traditional values?

In its damning conclusions, the answers given are plainly: yes, 
yes, yes, no and no. Of the 40 people interviewed in 11 overseas 
countries, 35 were living in dangerous circumstances on arrival 
at their initial destination and only five are now clearly safe. 
Following extensive research, including corroboration of the 
former detainee's accounts, the team came to the following 
unavoidable conclusion:

"We conclude that the Australia has not adequately respected and 
safeguarded some fundamental human rights of the people we 
interviewed. It appears that the Government's present policy 
regarding refugees is dictated not by the principles of the 
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Refugee Convention 
but by other political agenda."

Accountability and responsibility

Questions of accountability and responsibility in the removal of 
rejected asylum seekers are blurred by the outsourcing of the 
Department's various roles to contractors like ACM and its 
successor Global Solutions. Not all the claims and stats 
available from the Government are what they seem at first glance. 
For example, while 3390 detainees were forcibly removed last 
year, many others are said to have left "voluntarily". However, 
this often occurs only after years of intolerable detention and 
under considerable pressure.

In the process of interviewing the deportees and coming to 
understand how they had wound up in their current predicament, 
the authors learned a lot about what the Government's pursuit of 
its political agenda entails. Prejudicial treatment and poor 
translation services often combine to undermine the "anxious 
scrutiny" required of DIMIA to avoid the possibility of 
refoulement — the term used to describe the removal of rejected 
asylum seekers to places that are unsafe.

The treatment of appeals of DIMIA decisions to the Refugee Review 
Tribunal (RRT) was also criticised. Only six per cent of adverse 
decisions by DMIA were set aside by the RRT in 2003. However, in 
the decade since 1993-94 an average of 15.36 per cent of RRT 
decisions were overturned on appeal to Australian courts. The 
Government responded to this situation by restricting asylum 
seekers' access to the courts. As a result, there were only 69 
RRT decisions set aside by the courts last year — down from 467 
cases in 1998-99. However, it is when the report gets down to 
summarising the cases of the deportees that the grubbiness of the 
official practices truly comes out.

Rajab's case is typical [the actual names of many individuals 
could not be given because of the continuing risk from 
authorities in destination countries]. Rajab fled Afghanistan 
when religious divisions between the families of his Shia and 
Hazara father and his Sunni and Pashtun mother exploded. 
Following his mother's conversion to Shia Islam, a group of 
Sunnis killed his elder brother and threatened his father. The 
family decided to send Rajab away.

The young Afghan was among the asylum seekers rescued by the 
Tampa who were taken into detention on Nauru. He remembers the 
lack of legal advice, poor standards of translation, low quality 
food, depression, isolation and uncertainty. He also recalls 
officials of the UNHCR and International Organisation for 
Migration telling Afghans of the determination of the Government 
to send his countrymen back, "because it is now the policy of 
Australia to send refugees back, however much your life will be 
in danger, you won't be accepted".

When a young friend died in the Nauru camp, he was persuaded to 
return to Kabul where, he was assured, a special centre for 
returnees had been established. There was no such centre. He was 
left in Kabul as the snow was starting to fall with little money 
and with only the clothes he wore on Nauru.

He found he was not safe in Afghanistan. A fundamentalist sect 
had seized his home and his family had fled, presumably to 
neighbouring countries. Rajab rented a room secretly with some 
companions. He escaped an assassination attempt before fleeing 
himself to a neighbouring country where his situation remains 
unsafe.

The Australian Government is aware that the security and human 
rights situation in Afghanistan and several other destination 
countries is unsatisfactory. Nevertheless it promotes the myth 
that the overthrow of the Taliban regime has enabled many asylum 
seekers to return safely. In other cases, it has returned people 
to countries like Iran which, in other contexts, it has described 
as gross violators of human rights and "rogue states". The 
constant in the cases appears to the authors of the report to be 
the drive to deliver rough justice and high rates of returned 
asylum seekers.

Getting down and dirty

The descriptions of the cases in Deported to Danger in 
their general terms are disturbing enough, but it is some of the 
detail that reveals most about the extreme behaviour of 
Australian authorities.

A member of the Bedoon ethnic minority from Kuwait was encouraged 
to go to Syria where he was assured he could live safely. It was 
only when he was about to board his flight that he saw that the 
Syrian Visa obtained for him was only valid for a few months. He 
was given US$200 to pass to Syrian immigration officers as a 
bribe to avoid being taken into detention. Before his nightmare 
ended with a successful application for asylum in another first 
world country, he had been jailed and beaten in Syria.

Another deportee to Syria was given an airline ticket to go to 
that country but which had a final destination of Kuwait shown on 
the document. The deportee believes, very reasonably, that this 
was done to give Syrian officials the impression that he was 
staying a short time in the country before continuing on to 
Kuwait. There is a colour photo of the ticket in the report with 
the DIMIA clearly shown as the purchaser.

Other reports from Sri Lankan asylum seekers show how ACM guards 
would intimidate detainees by threatening to fax details of 
investigations into terrorist links ahead of them before their 
arrival in Colombo. By the way, although the report uses the 
terms "deportation" and "forced removal" interchangeably due to 
their common usage, deportation normally refers to the removal of 
criminal subjects. None of the people interviewed were suspected 
of terrorist or other criminal acts or associations. However, 
some deportees were jailed on their return to Sri Lanka on the 
strength of faxes from DIMIA. They were subsequently found 
innocent and released.

Deported to Danger has 60 pages of this sort of evidence 
against the Australian Government. Its authors now want urgent 
official action and truth. Its closing paragraph has a warning 
for us all in these days of anti-human right-wing political 
dominance: "The stories of our rejected asylum seekers remind us 
that to ignore or deny the rights of one person puts the rights 
of all of us in jeopardy."