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Australia's Malaysia refugee swap under fire
Agence France Presse - September 17, 2011
The government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard has struggled to implement its controversial deal with Malaysia under which it wants to send 800 asylum seekers to the Asian nation in return for accepting some 4,000 of its refugees.
The High Court last month blocked the proposal, ruling Canberra could not send boatpeople to a country without adequate protections, prompting Gillard to seek to amend the Migration Act to ensure offshore transfers can go ahead.
Protesters targeted Immigration Minister Bowen Saturday, repeatedly interrupting an open-air press conference in western Sydney at which he was urging opposition leader Tony Abbott to pass the new legislation.
He called on Abbott to accept that the High Court ruling made all offshore processing of asylum-seekers doubtful – even though Australia had previously sent boatpeople to Papua New Guinea and the tiny Pacific state of Nauru.
"The legal advice is clear... that offshore processing cannot occur in any way and with any certainty without the parliament passing legislation," Bowen said.
"That applies to Papua New Guinea, it applies to Nauru, it applies to Malaysia, it applies to any other place."
Refugee activists repeatedly heckled the minister. "Clearly, this is a very controversial issue," Bowen said at one point.
Opposition leader Abbott, whose support is crucial to the bill being passed, had said earlier his Liberal Party had yet to determine whether it would agree to the Migration Act amendments but he was "troubled" by the draft.
Abbott, who supported asylum-seekers being sent to other countries when conservative leader John Howard was in government, said the new laws would remove safeguards for boatpeople and allow a system of "offshore dumping".
"My initial response, and that of my senior colleagues, is that the draft legislation strips out protections that the Howard government thought was necessary," he said.
Abbott said he also had concerns the proposed changes would give the immigration minister total discretion over where asylum-seekers could be sent.
"It is really legislation for offshore dumping," he said. "It's providing the minister with an unfettered discretion that doesn't require any need for relevant human rights standards."
But Bowen said protections for asylum-seekers were "built in" to the bilateral arrangement agreed with Malaysia, which is not a signatory to the United Nations convention on refugees.
"The Malaysia arrangement, which has got those human rights protections built into it – this is an arrangement where Malaysia has agreed to treat people with dignity and respect," Bowen said.
With her Greens coalition partners against the offshore processing of refugees, Gillard's Labor government needs the support of the opposition to pass the amended legislation.
The plan, which Canberra hopes will form part of a regional framework to crack down on people-smugglers, has been broadly criticised by refugee advocates who argue Australia is abandoning its responsibilities to refugees.
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