Leading non-partisan research centre recommends reform of airport asylum process
Priority should be on protection rather than current emphasis on visa cancellation, detention and deportation
Real-world experience featured in video explainer accompanying new policy brief
Australian Border Force officials without relevant expertise are making life-or-death decisions about people seeking asylum at the airport, according to a policy brief released today from UNSW's Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law that recommends reform.
Under current policies, travellers who claim refugee status at Australian airports can be turned away and sent back to countries where they may be at risk of serious harm, after being interviewed behind closed doors and without access to lawyers, says the policy brief written by Regina Jefferies (Kaldor Centre), Daniel Ghezelbash (Macquarie Law School), and Asher Hirsch (Refugee Council of Australia/Monash University).
This extraordinary entry-screening process has resulted in refugees being hand-cuffed and detained, simply for raising a protection claim in the airport. Even worse, some have been immediately returned to the country where they fear harm, without a robust assessment of their claim or access to any review of the decision.
The Kaldor Centre policy brief – 'Assessing Protection Claims at Airports: Developing procedures to meet international and domestic obligations' – steps through Australia's current approach, which prioritises visa cancellation, mandatory detention and removal, rather than protection needs. The authors outline reforms necessary to bring Australia's policies in line with principles of procedural fairness and international refugee and human rights law protections.
'The COVID-19 pandemic, by bringing international travel pretty much to a halt, presents the perfect moment to fix this,' says Jefferies, a lawyer and UNSW Scientia PhD Scholar at the Kaldor Centre.
'With air travel set to be transformed, these procedures can also be reformed so that people are not sent back to harm, or otherwise only able to access temporary protection, simply because they did not leave the bounds of the airport before making a claim for protection.
The authors recommend that visas should not be cancelled because a protection claim is raised at an Australian airport, that protection claims should always be evaluated, and that detention should only ever be used as a last resort and where individual circumstances demand it. Screening procedures should be set out in legislation, the authors say, with safeguards such as requiring that rejections be reviewable by independent decision-makers before an asylum seeker is removed from Australia.
Read the full policy brief, 'Assessing Protection Claims at Airports: Developing procedures to meet international and domestic obligations'.
View/embed the video explainer: Travellers with a valid visa to enter Australia as a tourist, student, or worker routinely have those visas cancelled if it becomes apparent at the airport that they might seek protection. Once the visa is cancelled, they are in a precarious position, subject to removal or detention – and only at that late stage does a government official decide whether they are allowed to lodge a claim or not. A visitor who experienced this process first-hand tells his story in a video, 'Australia's airport asylum process explained', released with the policy brief.
About the authors:
Regina Jefferies is a Scientia PhD Scholar at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Sydney. Her research focuses on street-level bureaucrats, policy implementation, technology, and legal compliance in the context of immigration and refugee law.
Dr Daniel Ghezelbash is an Associate Professor at Macquarie Law School and the founder and director of the Macquarie University Social Justice Clinic. His book, Refuge Lost: Asylum Law in an Interdependent World (Cambridge University Press 2018), examines the diffusion of restrictive asylum seeker policies around the world.
Asher Hirsch is a Senior Policy Officer at the Refugee Council of Australia, and a PhD Candidate and Lecturer at Monash University in public law, human rights, and refugee law. His PhD investigates Australia's extraterritorial migration control activities in Southeast Asia.
