Australia’s highest court backs hard line on immigration

PanARMENIAN.Net - Australia’s highest court has backed the government’s hard line on detention of asylum seekers in poor Pacific island nations, in a ruling that is likely to be watched in Europe as it battles its own migrant crisis, the Wall Street Journal reports.

In a setback for refugee advocates, the High Court of Australia rejected an argument that offshore detention of asylum seekers in a third country should be illegal, a policy that has drawn repeated condemnation from the United Nations and rights groups.

Successive Australian governments since 2001 have overseen policies of sending asylum seekers on offshore detention in Nauru and neighboring Papua New Guinea while claims for refugee status are assessed, often for lengthy periods lasting more than a year.

Those policies hardened ahead of the last election won by the conservatives in 2013 with former Prime Minister Tony Abbott deploying the navy to turn back asylum boats at sea, while pledging that even people assessed as genuine refugees would never be resettled in Australia.

The latest legal challenge against military-backed policies to blockade migrant boats at sea was brought by a Bangladeshi woman sent to an Australian-backed detention center on Nauru. When it was launched, the Australian government amended legislation to back up the legality of offshore processing.

“The Court held, by majority, that the plaintiff was not entitled to the declaration sought,” the court said in its ruling Wednesday, Feb 3, according to the Journal.

European nations have started to harden immigration policies, as more than one million migrants arrived by boat last year. Denmark’s parliament recently adopted a bill to deter asylum seekers by seizing their cash and valuables.

Some anti-immigration politicians have looked to Australian policies as a potentially partial solution, while Brussels has called for an Australian-style paramilitary border force to police the bloc’s borders.

Dubbed “Operation Sovereign Borders” by the Australian government, some policies including accusations of A$30,000 payments for people smugglers to turn their vessels around at sea, have been criticized by rights groups and the United Nations as potentially in violation of international refugee laws.

Opponents of the policies in Australia have been pinning their hopes on a change of heart since Malcolm Turnbull replaced Abbott last year in a political coup at the head of the conservative government, with the new prime minister being more progressively moderate than Abbott on social policies.

But Turnbull mounted a strong defense of the policy after the judgment and said that the policies had helped prevent deaths at sea caused by a succession of asylum boats sinking during passage from overseas ports, mostly in Indonesia, the Journal says.

”Our commitment today is simply this: The people smugglers will not prevail over our sovereignty. Our borders are secure. The line has to be drawn somewhere and it is drawn at our border,” the Prime Minister told parliament.