Australia’s refugee swap plan goes to court

Refugee advocates say that if the refugee swap happens, a family will be spilt where the father stays in Australia while the wife and child will be deported.

SYDNEY: The Australian government today faced a High Court challenge to its plan to send boat people to Malaysia or elsewhere offshore, after lawyers said the deal would break up a family.

Canberra wants to ship 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia as it battles to stem the tide of boats arriving on its shores and dismantle people-smuggling operations.
In exchange, it will accept 4,000 registered refugees from the Southeast Asian country.

But refugee advocates say the proposal means a Kurdish man who has been granted refugee status in Australia will be forced apart from his wife and son, who arrived by boat after him and are set to be processed elsewhere.

“Really this case is about stopping the government from permanently splitting up a family who are trying to reunite and to live together in safety,” said the lawyer for the woman and four-year-old child, David Manne.

Manne said under Australian and international law there was a right to family unity for refugees.
He said the family were ethnic Kurds who had been forced to flee Iraq under the former regime of Saddam Hussein and had since lived in exile, stateless in Iran.

“And for all of that time they have faced systematic mistreatment, abuse, including arbitrary — the real risk of arbitrary detention and of other serious abuses,” Manne told ABC television.

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said it was inappropriate for him to comment on specific cases, but he believed the Malaysian agreement was on “very, very strong legal grounds”.

Bowen said blanket exceptions to the rule of sending all boatpeople offshore would only provide a loophole for people smugglers to exploit, but confirmed that vulnerable cases would be assessed on their circumstances.

The High Court challenge follows a formal condemnation of the widely criticised plan from Australian lawmakers, with MPs, including key crossbenchers, voting 70-68 for a motion demanding the policy be abandoned.

It was the first time lawmakers have formally condemned Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who leads a fragile coalition with a mere one-seat majority.

The deal with Malaysia, which is yet to be finalised, is aimed at stopping asylum seekers arriving by boat after more than 3,000 came in the second half of 2010.

More than 250 boatpeople have arrived since the Malaysia proposal was announced in early May.