CANBERRA, Nov 29: Prime Minister John Howard on Thursday pledged to continue Australia’s hardline against asylum seekers in the face of international condemnation.
International agencies have called for an inquiry into Australia’s detention of immigrants and Indonesia has denounced Howard’s so-called Pacific solution policy of sending asylum seekers to third countries for processing.
Australia’s human rights watchdog on Wednesday announced a new inquiry into the detention of children in immigration camps.
But Amnesty International called for the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) investigation to be widened to consider the arbitrary nature of detention.
The United Nations convention on the rights of the child states detention should be used only as a last resort, Amnesty said.
Howard said while the government would cooperate with the HREOC inquiry, it would not lead to an easing of its stance on asylum seekers.
“We’ll cooperate, but I want to make it plain that we’re not going to alter our policy in relation to mandatory detention,” Howard told commercial radio.
He claimed children were sent to Australia unaccompanied by parents to force authorities to grant their family a visa.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda warned Australia’s so-called Pacific solution to illegal immigration would fail in the long term.
Wirayuda, visiting Australia in a bid to thaw relations cooled by East Timor and people-trafficking, said he did not believe the processing of asylum seekers in countries such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea would deter people from trying to enter Australia.
“Hopefully this arrangement will bring about at least temporary solutions to the problems,” he said in a lecture at the Australian National University.
“But I don’t believe this Pacific solution would be the best way to address at least in terms of a long-term perspective of these problems.”
Wirayuda, who on Wednesday secured Australian agreement to co-host with Jakarta a regional conference on illegal migration in February, said the problem required an international solution.
He also said the end of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan offered an opportunity to help slow the exodus of refugee hopefuls from the Middle East and the subcontinent.
“I think the bulk of these illegal migrants are economic migrants rather than refugees in terms of the 1991 convention on refugees,” he said.
“We have a slight hope that with a solution to the Afghan situation, it will create a window of opportunity, an option for many of these illegal migrants to go back.”
But Howard said it was too soon to send Afghan boat people back to their homeland.
“I think it’s a little too early to assume that a completely new dawn has emerged in Afghanistan,” he said.
“Certainly it’s more promising but it’s very important that the political settlement is one where there’s power shared and we don’t have one difficult regime replaced in time by another.
“Certainly, with the Taliban gone, and if you do have more peaceful stable conditions in Afghanistan, you will probably have fewer refugees wanting to leave and there will be the opportunity for some to go back.
“Right at the moment, the conditions for people to return are not very good.
“Maybe as a result of the Taliban being removed they will improve over a period of months, but right at the moment there’s still a lot of shooting going on and it’s just not realistic to say we’ll send people back the day after the Taliban has been removed from particular cities.”—AFP