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In 2014, we only took in 750 refugees and asylum seekers. Isn't it time we stopped our narrow perceptions about foreign policy? There are other things than free trade alone.
In the case of the
refugee and asylum seeker wave currently crossing Europe, these desperate people
are fleeing a repressive callous government and an equally brutal and murderous
ISIS insurgent movement. There are other refugee and asylum flows, from
societies like Uganda and Nigeria, that consist predominantly of LGBT
individuals seeking a better life outside such repressive, dysfunctional and
undemocratic regimes. Due to proximity, most try to make it to Western Europe.
In the case of non-LGBT refugees, from Iraq, Afghanistan and South West Asia,
the destination is often Australia. While Greece and Italy have unexpectedly
humane policies when it comes to refugees and asylum seekers, given that they
are the first ports of call for those crossing the Mediterranean in ramshackle
boats that often capsize en route, the same cannot be said for other nations
across Western Europe. Hungary has a repressive Fidesz anti-immigrant and social
government, so it is no coincidence that Budapest has seen significant conflict.
Commendably, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has sternly denounced
anti-immigrant racists and neofascists within Germany and promised that any
organised racist violence will not be tolerated at all. As for France, the
French National Front is a significant party within French national politics
still, despite its anti-Semitism, Islamophobic sectarianism and anti-immigrant
racism and the current schism between Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, current
National Front leader. While the neofascist British National Party has
thankfully declined in influence, the United Kingdom has problems with its
refugee and asylum policies. And shamefully, so does Australia.
However, it took a
single death to galvanise public opinion around toward compassion and inclusion.
Three year old Syrian Kurdish child Aylan Kurdi was drowned as his family tried
to escape the horrific turmoil in his homeland. The response has been
heartening- Austria has welcomed the refugees en route to Germany and offered
them food, safe shelter and further transport. The Cameron, Abbott and Key
administrations have all agreed to increase their humanitarian intake due to the
scale of the humanitarian crisis in Syria and Iraq, albeit not by much in the
case of New Zealand. The New Zealand Medical Association, Labour and Green
Opposition parties, Anglican and Catholic church leadership, New Zealand
metropolitan centre mayors, and even the Young Nationals, urged the government
to do much more than it is. However, it still seems as if the government is only
prepared to take a thousand or so refugees and no more.
Australia doesn't
receive nearly as much condemnation and opposition to its draconian denial of
human rights and international treaty agreements, such as the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of Refugees as it deserves from New Zealand. Because of
our distance from global maritime trade and transit routes, and our anemic
economy, New Zealand is not a core destination for asylum seekers at present and
agitation against their prospective arrival is ignored. That may not last
forever, as there is the matter of climate change to consider. If the world's
average temperature rises by three percent, as some scientists are now arguing,
the Amazon rain forest may be aflame and Australia's agricultural infrastructure
may completely break down, and New Zealand will become a more attractive
destination for refugees and asylum seekers. Moreover, the countries of origin
will change- storms will ravage Indonesia, New Guinea, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma
and Bangladesh and cause hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of fatalities.
Under those circumstances, New Zealand may become a more attractive target for
refugees and asylum seekers.
What proportion of
those refugees and asylum seekers will be LGBT individuals? Much depends on the
reasons that such individuals might flee their homelands. In the case of Syria
and Iraq, there is ongoing active persecution from both Syria's Assad
dictatorship and the ISIS Islamist guerilla insurgency. In the case of Damascus,
LGBT individuals are imprisoned, tortured and coerced into acting as regime
informants, while ISIS has repeatedly executed gay men through throwing them off
buildings. In the case of Uganda, Nigeria and Russia, the United Kingdom is
closer, while in the case of Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, the preferred
destination is Australia. Once there, refugees and asylum seekers face an
uncertain destiny.
In January 2015, I
reported on a recent DNA article on the ordeal that gay male refugees and
asylum seekers face on Manus Island. The latter is a dependency of Papua New
Guinea, where gay men can still be imprisoned for fourteen years. Australia is
in breach of several agreements related to the human rights of refugees and
asylum seekers, such as the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of
Refugees, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International
Covenant on Cultural, Social and Economic Rights, the UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child and the UN Convention Against Torture. Specifically, Clause
33 within Australia's Migration Act 1958 is in contravention of the UN
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which specifically forbids
signatories from "refoulement." This term refers to returning refugees and
asylum seekers to countries of origin if it is certain that they will face
torture, unjust imprisonment, religious persecution, arbitrary killing, rape or
other violations of universal human rights. It also insists that refugees and
asylum seekers are housed in humane conditions. According to DNA's Mason
Green, that certainly is not the case when it comes to Papua New Guinea's Manus
Island. Physical assault, sexual violence and rape are rife on Manus Island.
Moreover, Papua New Guinea's Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary is thoroughly
corrupt, routinely violates the human rights of prisoners and has been involved
in sexual abuse of women and children itself. As for the current Papua New
Guinea government, Transparency International has rated it an abyssmal 150/176
insofar as corruption and the absence of transparency and accountability goes,
yet the Abbott administration still subsidises the Manus Island facility and
contributes foreign aid to the Papua New Guinea government. It is high time New
Zealand held its nearest neighbour to account over its grotesque record on
refugees and asylum seekers. Thus far, Green MP Denise Roche is the only New
Zealand MP to do so. No such criticism has come from the Key
administration.
Insofar as the
United Kingdom goes, the Cameron administration is to be partly commended for
ceasing to utilise the ludicrous grounds that the defunct UK Border Agency used
to abruptly deport refugees and asylum seekers back to their countries of
origin, no matter if they faced homophobic or transphobic torture, violence or
homicide upon arrival back in countries like Nigeria or Uganda. LGBT asylum
seekers are often engaged in enforced secrecy and concealment of their sexual or
gender identities in their countries of origin, they distrust government
agencies from bitter personal experience of those within their countries of
origin, and because of the need for secrecy, there is little documentary
evidence of their sexual orientation or gender identity available. In September
2015, Tom Ling reviewed the burgeoning crisis and government agency response.
Ling slammed the British tabloid gutter press for its outright fabrications and
falsehoods, as the right-wing Daily Mail had claimed that refugees and asylum
seekers were being advised to 'feign' homosexuality to expedite their
applications for sanctuary. The truth is far from this, as one might guess.
While the Border Agency was justifiably dismantled for its abuse of due process,
the Detention Fast Track alternative is no better, and allows refugees and
asylum seekers to be held in crowded and violent facilities that lack privacy,
as well as adequate duration when it comes to objective evaluation and scrutiny
of asylum claims. The United Kingdom Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group has
assisted many LGBT refugees and asylum seekers to negotiate the system, and they
have the support of current UK Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration John
Vine, as well as Cameron administration Immigration Minister James Brokenshire.
To his credit, Brokenshire has acknowledged the serious flaws within the
Detention Fast Track system and closed it down. Whether or not a modified
version will be re-introduced is still uncertain.
On the face of it,
New Zealand seems more merciful and compassionate. As one can see from the
attached case of an Iranian gay man who was granted the right to appeal against
a deportation sentence, New Zealand's refugee and asylum assessment agencies are
diligent and thorough in recognising their human rights obligations and include
LGBTI rights within that ambit of analysis, which has been the case since 1993,
as an earlier case notes (although the Immigration and Protection Tribunal has
now replaced the earlier Refugee Status Appeals Authority). Many of our own
LGBT asylum seekers from Columbia, Burundi, Pakistan, Egypt, Uganda and the
Maldives have praised the relative accessibility and humanity of New Zealand's
refugee and asylum system, but Amnesty International is rightly critical of the
limited intake of refugees and the apparently arbitrary limit of 750, although
given the scale of the Syrian and Iraqi refugee crisis, this has now expanded to
1500, albeit over a two year span.
Recommended:
"Mayors want rise
in refugee quota" Radio New
Zealand: 06.09.2015:http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/283414/mayors-
want-rise-in-refugee-quota
"Government bows to
refugee pressure" Otago Daily
Times: 07.09.2015:http://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/354942/government
-bows-refugee-pressure
"NZMA calls for
more refugee support" Scoop: 05.09.2015: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1509/S00046/nzma-calls-for-more-refugee-support.htm
"Church leaders
call for increase in refugee numbers" New Zealand Herald: 05.09.2015: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&o
bjectid=11508808
New Zealand Refugee Status Appeals Authority: Refugee Appeal No 74665/03: http://www.refugee.org. nz/74665-03.html
New Zealand Refugee Status Appeals Authority: Refugee Appeal No 1312/93:
http://www.refugee.org.nz/rsaa
/text/docs/1312-93.htm
Mason Green:
"Australian Horror Story: Asylum" DNA 180 (December 2014): 66-71
Wikipedia/Corruption in Papua Guinea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Papua_New_Guinea
"Making Their Own
Rules: Police Beatings, Rape and Torture of Children in Papua New Guinea" Human Rights Watch (2005): http://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/png0905/
David Miah: "A Gay
Asylum Seeker in Britain" Gay Times 418 (May 2013): 106-111.
Tom Ling: "LGBT
Asylum Seekers" Gay Times 446 (September 2015): 30-31.
UK Lesbian and Gay
Immigration Group: http://www.lgig.org.uk
