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The 2005 Senate Inquiry into the Migration Act

In August 2005, there was a major Senate Inquiry into the Migration Act. It was an inquiry, decided prior to July 2005, almost in the spirit of "the last stand" of parliamentary democracy, and partly driven by the fear for what may not be possible with an absolute majority of the Howard government after the Senate 'turns over' as a result of the 2004 Federal election.

Below are the two submissions Project SafeCom sent in for the Inquiry. All submissions are listed on the Parliamentary website here.

Related pages:

21 October 2005: Marion Lê OAM testifies to the 2005 Senate Inquiry into the Migration Act - "My conclusion, after the last 30 years of working ... is that in the last few years it has developed a culture of denial, suspicion and active destruction of human beings. It absolutely defies belief that people can be that cruel to another human being."

10 November 2006: The 2005 Senate Inquiry into the Migration Act - this submission by former DIMA staffer and Migration worker Frederika Steen, who works as a volunteer for the Brisbane-based Romero Centre, is an excellent argument for the almost complete failure of the administration of the Migration Act under the Howard government's cruel set of ethics.

Public Submission to Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee

Inquiry into the administration and operation of the Migration Act 1958

To the Committee Secretary
Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee
Department of the Senate
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600 Australia
Email: legcon.sen(at)aph.gov.au

Wednesday, 27 July 2005

Dear Secretary

Proposal to amend the Migration Act

Summary: Australia does not adhere to clauses of "non-refoulement" in the Convention when removing failed asylum seekers from Australia. Forced deportations breach the UN Refugee Convention as well as several other conventions. Removals from Australia should be in line with Convention demands and be voluntary, in collaboration with removee, as a last resort only, to a destination chosen in consensus with the removee.

Introduction: several points underpinning the proposal

1. The United Nations Refugee Convention is quite explicit about the status of refugees, also both before and after the process of acceptance by member countries. The UNHCR states that refugee status exists prior to and independent of the recognition of this status by member countries. The clear implication of this is that the Minister or politicians, or a judge or assessment panel may well say "this is not a refugee", but such statements are at all times a subjective interpretation of how that Minister, politician, judge or assessing officer views the refugee case against the guidelines of the Convention. The implication is also one where countries need to incorporate this notion in its assessment and in its public statements, for example in the media and in parliament.

2. A Convention country that cannot conclude that an asylum claimant is a refugee in their understanding and assessment still has an obligation to this claimant. The claimant may have failed the assessment, but it is not correct to call the claimant "a failed refugee", or "not a refugee" in keeping with the point made above.

3. The obligations a country such as Australia has to those who do, in its view, not fall within the criteria for refugee status, are several, but the most familiar obligation is one where we promise to "not refoule" a claimant. In common terms we promise to not return the claimant to a country where he or she is in fear of persecution. This fear, as defined in the convention, is not one as assessed during the refugee claim assessment, but solely as perceived by the claimant and as expressed by the claimant. After all, the claimant was unsuccessful in gaining refugee status, yet the country cannot say that the claimant does not have any validity when he/she expresses to have a fear for persecution when returned to the country he/she fled from. While this seems a contradiction - because the country has just concluded that the claimant's claim 'to be in fear of persecution' does not hold validity in its assessment - is simply is a truism when looking at the Convention that the assessment of "fear for persecution" is one simply as defined by the claimant. The criterion simply is "if the asylum claimant fears it". This being the case, there is a ground for 'collaboration' with the asylum claimant, also in this area.

Because of Australia's non-refoulement obligations, it also stands clear that a partisan defender - such as a lawyer or migration agent of the claimant's choice, accompanies a claimant throughout this phase.

4. Australia has forcibly removed asylum seekers. To the methods during these journeys belong physical restraints such as hand-cuffs, foot-cuffs, mouths taped up, hoods, and chemical restraints - injections or oral sedatives.

5. Australia has also removed people to destinations where they are at a serious risk for further persecution, imprisonment, torture, or death. Several reports and literature now published, testify of these removals.

6. While many Convention countries apply a process of "secondary assessment" for those who cannot fall within the narrow Refugee Convention criteria, evaluating whether the claimant could be granted a humanitarian visa, Australia does not have embedded in the Migration Act such a secondary assessment system. Australia falls well short compared to other countries in this area.

7. The number of asylum seekers who reach Australia, either "unannounced" by boat or by other means, represents a mere trickle compared to other countries.

8. People who arrive by boat, unannounced, simply do so because they exercise their explicit right: the creation and formulation of the UN Convention for the Status of Refugees derives from the fact that boatpeople around the time of the Second World War were repelled from countries' harbours. Boatpeople who arrive in Australia do not have a lesser right to do so that those who arrive unannounced by plane. It is certainly not illegal.

9. The notion of "third country" when considering removal from Australia is an option that only gains credibility in the eyes of the countries approached for this purpose, if it is well-known that Australia does not shirk its responsibility but carries the weight of the world-wide refugee placement and intake, also of unannounced arrivals, and that Australia's treatment of refugees including unannounced arrivals is beyond reproach and of the highest and best international standard and standing.

10. Recent changes to the Migration Act have created a role for an Ombudsman as an outside arbiter. This role is as yet unexplored, but may well be extended in the future.

Proposal

Project SafeCom proposes that the Migration Act be amended so that the Act is convincing and leaves no doubt about the fact that

1. Australia will never forcibly remove asylum claimants from Australia

2. Removal from Australia is a last resort, and secondary determination and the granting of humanitarian visas at all times takes precedence over removal

3. Australia recognises that the fear of persecution upon return to the country of origin may exist independent of the assessment by Australian authorities of the validity of a refugee claim under the UN Convention, and Australia therefore recognises and pro-actively exercises its obligation to "not refoule" asylum seekers

4. If, as a last resort only, Australia intends to move towards removal of an out-processed asylum seeker it will do so only in a process of consensus decision-making between the minister or his/her delegate and the asylum seeker. If a consensus cannot be reached, the Ombudsman will act as an arbiter until the consensus has been reached. This consensus process will include the option of the asylum seeker nominating a "red zone destination" or a country or countries where he/she will not be removed to, in keeping with item (3). Australia will support the claimant also by providing costs of lawyer(s) and/or migration agent(s) chosen by the claimant and assisting the claimant throughout this phase

5. The option of resettlement of an out-processed asylum seeker in a "third country" will be vigorously pursued in collaboration with the asylum seeker within the consensus model mentioned in item (4), but the option of "third country resettlement" ranks lower than the option of "secondary determination" mentioned in item (2)

Yours Sincerely,

For Project SafeCom
Jack H. Smit

Public Submission to Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee

Inquiry into the administration and operation of the Migration Act 1958

Additional Submission to "Submission No 8"

as listed on the Committee's website

To the Committee Secretary
Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee
Department of the Senate
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600 Australia
Email: legcon.sen(at)aph.gov.au

Wednesday, 3 August 2005

Dear Secretary

Proposal to amend the Migration Act
The Refugee Determination Process

Summary: The primary refugee determination system and also the Refugee Review Tribunal determinations have led to prolong the sheer agony of thousands of asylum seekers who asked for Australia's help when they arrived, especially for 'unannounced arrivals'.

The failure of these processes has become part of the problem instead of the solution. Australia should urgently implement considerable and lasting changes to the procedures and ways of determining claims. It is not true that the length of time spent in detention is a result of 'too many court appeals', but plainly and with overwhelming evidence a result of flaws in the determination process.

Attachment: an attachment - not for publication - has also been forwarded to the Committee. This attachment contains the names and contact details of several individuals who have confirmed to be willing to appear before the Inquiry to testify about several issues raised in this and our previous submission.

Introduction

Immediately following the Coalition party room discussions on May 31 2005 of the two Bills seeking considerable changes to the Migration Act, as presented by the socalled "Petro Georgiou group", several coalition MP's have raised suggestions that the time spent in detention centres by asylum claimants could be considerably reduced by limiting the opportunities for court appeals by those claimants, and they announced that upon gaining a Senate majority after July 1 2005, the Howard government would seek to enact limitations to court appeals available to asylum seekers.

These opinions were expressed by several MP's, amongst them Mr Malcolm Turnbull, Member for Wentworth, Mr Mal Washer, Member for Moore, the Attorney-General Hon Philip Ruddock, Member for Berowra, and the Treasurer Hon Peter Costello, Member for Higgins.

On the face of it, these suggestions sound very plausible, and put so simply, Australian people may well have supported these suggestive propositions if they were presented as part of a political platform. Upon close scrutiny however, the statements are not what they appear to be, because the reason for the many court appeals can be convincingly traced back to what Project SafeCom claims to be a shocking and extremely disturbing error rate in primary DIMIA refugee assessments, which has given rise to lengthy appeals, first to the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT), and subsequently to the Federal Court, the Full Federal Court, the High Court, and in several cases submissions to the full bench of the High Court.

This submission makes the case of the error rate of the primary assessments and following this also highlights some quoted examples of debatable decision-making by members of the RRT, and suggests that urgent review is needed of

This submission also suggests how the changes would improve expertise, impartiality, and fairness to the legitimate claimant in Australia's refugee assessment and determination processes.

Primary DIMIA assessment

shocking error rates

As early as August 2002, Jesuit priest and lawyer Fr Frank Brennan produces some results of his research in the Bowral Town Hall. Brennan states:

During this last financial year [2001-02], the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) set aside 62% of all Afghan decisions appealed and 87% of all Iraqi decisions appealed. This means that Afghan asylum seekers got it right 62% of the time when they claimed that the departmental decision makers got it wrong. And the public servants got it wrong 87% of the times that the Iraqi applicants claim to have been mistakenly assessed.

Frank Brennan's figures put the average error rate of the DIMIA primary decision maker in this context at about seventy-five per cent.

When fifty-three Vietnamese asylum seekers in 2003 "almost" entered the Port Hedland harbour undetected on their boat, the Hao Kiet, and were subsequently sent to the detention centre on Christmas Island, initial DIMIA assessment concluded that none of them were refugees.

Last week however, on July 29, the last of those refugees flew from the island to Perth, concluding the sorry saga of more than two years of imprisonment for the members of just one large extended family. The Minister for Immigration, the Hon Senator Vanstone, last week also announced she had reconsidered a refusal, by the one RRT member who had concluded in June that 14 members of the group he had reviewed were not refugees, and she admitted that she had done so because their circumstances had been similar to the others, who had already been determined to be refugees.

The Hao Kiet story thus produced an error rate of the DIMIA primary decision maker of one hundred per cent.

This situation gives one to think that the DIMIA primary assessment procedure is entirely broke and void of any credibility whatsoever. There is however more. Dr David Corlett of Latrobe University in his recent book Following them Home: the fate of the returned asylum seekers (Black Inc Agenda), writes:

The Immigration Department, then the Refugee Review Tribunal and the Federal Court, rejected Amir's claim for refugee status in Australia. He was one of those asylum seekers that the former Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, would have cited as pursuing unmeritorious claims through the courts. The Minister said that this was to delay departure from Australia. Maybe. But more important for Amir was the sense that his claim had never been properly heard. Other refugees and asylum seekers with whom I have spoken have said that their treatment on arrival - often kept in isolation and being denied access to legal advice and information about the refugee determination system, being told that Australia would not accept them and that they should return - set the tone for the rest of their time in Australia.

From that moment on, they simply did not trust Australian officials. Their experience of a refugee determination process in which decision-makers were inconsistent and uninformed added to their lack of faith in the Australian system and demonstrated to them that the process was both highly politicised and stacked against them. Amir's distrust was confirmed by the incompetence of the government-appointed legal advisers during the early stages of the refugee determination process. (pages 115-6)

'making up' another barrier?

Project SafeCom places serious doubts, not just on the competence levels of the primary decision makers at the DIMIA, but also on the integrity of the DIMIA "sticking to the rules", even to the point that officers could stand accused of warping the fairness of open and transparent assessment in the initial phase. Dr Corlett also lifts the lid of other aspects in the determination process, which suggests that the DIMIA makes up its own "extra phase" in primary assessments. From his book again:

Upon arrival in Australia, he was granted a short initial-entry interview in which he gave the Australian authorities some basic details about his identity and where he had come from. He was then 'screened out': immigration officials deemed, from his cursory interview, that Australia had no protection obligations towards Mr Al-Khateeb. Unlike those 'screened in', he was denied the right even to apply for asylum. So he - and others from his boat - sat for six or seven months in 'separation detention', a part of the detention centre in which those people who were 'screened out' were kept away from other detainees and where they were denied access to any means of communication with the outside world. Twice a day, for ten minutes, he was allowed outside for a cigarette.

Men, women and children were all confined in this way. 'And every day someone from DIMIA [the Immigration Department] came and he said, "You don't have a chance in Australia and you are illegally in Australia and we don't accept you,"' Mr Al-Khateeb explained. '"You have to bring your passport and you have to go back and if you don't go back we send you back by force. You don't have any choice in Australia. You have to go back." Seven months like this.' (pages 151-2)

The Refugee Review Tribunal

If the primary determination by officers of DIMIA is in serious discredit to the point where an outside observer may well say that if DIMIA were a private company, its shareholders would have long left, the board would have long ago been sacked, and the company would be in receivership, then it is all the more important that the Refugee Review Tribunal performs impeccably, thoroughly, and with the highest credits and standard.

plenty of credentials, but the right ones?

That cannot be claimed however, and recent writings of Professor Mirko Bargaric - a part-time member of the RRT - his questionable opinions on torture and the ensuing media frenzy have shown some shortcomings of the RRT structure. The members of the RRT may well be senior public servants with a good track record, some lawyers, some academics, but that says nothing about their capacity to review places of danger on the world map or about their capacity to patiently hear, work with interpreters, or independently assess, also independently of international politics, asylum claims, where things are often a matter of life and death.

In the RRT the term "tribunal" is a disturbing misnomer, because just one person constitutes that "tribunal", and the member does not have to be physically present - the claim can be heard by videolink.

Does the Senate Inquiry know all the anecdotal stories and details of all the Federal Court cases where an RRT member was plainly wrong, where the member did not seem to show any interest in the claimant or the case whatsoever, or where the member showed serious lack of knowledge, whether this was country-specific knowledge or other facts about forms of acknowledged persecution in countries, widely known amongst representative organisations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty or UNHCR? Is the Senate Inquiry informed about the percentage of RRT determinations that were re-determined after court actions?

some examples

Once more back to the Vietnamese from the Hao Kiet: about two months ago most of the 53 asylum seekers were granted a Temporary Protection Visa. But at the time they were almost ready to embark on Federal Court action after the primary assessment determined they were not refugees, and after the RRT determination affirmed this refusal. Shortly before their Federal Court action however, the lawyers were informed by the DIMIA that "an error of law" had been made and they were given permission to return to the RRT. Following this admission that both the primary decision maker had been wrong and that following this the RRT had been wrong, the RRT member who dealt with "most" of the application that returned - following the DIMIA error of law admission - to the RRT found them to be refugees. Yet another member of the RRT remarkably, then maintained that fourteen members of this same family brought before him, were NOT refugees.

So last week, the Immigration Minister Senator Amanda Vanstone, so it was reported, had intervened because the remaining Vietnamese claimants were in a similar situation as those approved earlier when re-assessed by another RRT member. With that statement she only just stopped short of admitting the negative RRT member decision, determining that the last fourteen Vietnamese claimants were not refugees, was seriously flawed and had to be overturned through her intervention.

Mr David Corlett, once again in his book Following them Home: the fate of the returned asylum seekers, reports about the RRT member Ms Genevieve Hamilton:

In May 2001, Roqia Bakhtiyari had her application for a protection visa refused. The decision-maker did not believe her story. Roqia appealed this decision to the Refugee Review Tribunal. While accepting that Roqia was a Hazara, the tribunal member, Genevieve Hamilton, determined that Roqia was not from Afghanistan. In part this assessment was based on a language analysis which found that the dialect she spoke originated in Pakistan.

Furthermore, Hamilton noted, Roqia could not name the currency of Afghanistan. Hamilton found this 'barely plausible'. She found it implausible that Roqia could not name the months of the Afghan calendar. Roqia could not explain the route she and her family had taken from Afghanistan. Nor was she able to describe, to Hamilton's satisfaction, her life under the Taliban or recognise the language spoken by the majority Pashtoon ethnic group in Afghanistan. 'This is simply not possible if she lived in Afghanistan,' Hamilton wrote.

Roqia claimed that she had led an extremely sheltered life. Hamilton found her credibility 'remarkably poor'. She called Roqia's responses 'facile' to questions about her husband's treatment at the hands of the Taliban and her failure to question the people smuggler she had used about her husband's whereabouts.

But Hamilton's written decision reflects as much about her own lack of imagination and intellectual sophistication as it does Roqia's ignorance or duplicity. It seems not unreasonable that a woman who had grown up in an extraordinarily patriarchal society where she was confined to the home, where she had lived in an exceptionally remote area whose economy was predominantly barter oriented, and where, because of years of war, currencies rose and fell with the fortunes of the battlefield, would not know the national currency of that country. Nor is it obvious that such a woman would speak in detailed terms to her husband, in the single night they had together before he fled, of his imprisonment under the Taliban.

This is not to advance a judgement about the truth of Roqia Bakhtiyari's story. That remains an open question. What is noteworthy is that the tribunal member, a well-paid, tertiary-educated and highly literate member of a complex post-industrial society, was unable or unwilling to make the imaginative leap into the life of a woman from what might well have been a different universe, one which had been governed since the mid-'90's by an aggressive anti-modern regime which sought to make the already war-destroyed country back to the days of the Prophet. (pages 16-7)

Elsewhere, Corlett speaks about Sayed from Afghanistan:

Once in Australia, he had difficulty Australian decision-makers of his case. Initially, they said that he was not Afghan. Then, after a language test - where a recording of his speech was sent to a language 'expert' to determine from his accent and the words he used whether he was from Zabul - Sayed's Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) member accepted that he spoke Hazarigi from central Afghanistan, but did not accept that he was from the particular are he claimed. Sayed could not locate his particular village on the map. No matter that he was uneducated. No matter that he could describe the mountains and houses in the area. The fact that he could not find his home on a map of Afghanistan was enough to convince the tribunal member that Sayed was not from where he said he was. (page 90)

Systemic corruption?

To use the phrase 'systemic corruption' may have been unthinkable before The Palmer Report became public, and even after the Palmer Report these are big words. At Project SafeCom we would not have grounds to conclusively state this as our direct involvement with asylum seekers and refugees is somewhat limited. Not so for Dr Corlett:

The tales of Mr Al-Khateeb and others are evidence of a form of systemic corruption within the Immigration Department. (page 165)

The writer of this submission would call it the His Masters Voice effect. There is no doubt that the damaging undermining of internationally formulated rights also of unannounced boat-arrivals by politicians in the lead-up to the 2001 Federal election has brought the DIMIA staff member charged with Mr Al-Kahteeb's group in the detention centre to add to him "You don't have a chance in Australia and you are illegally in Australia and we don't accept you".

We contend that this attitude points straight back to a combination of the Prime Minister's election slogan "We shall control who comes to Australia and in which way they come" and the rather hissed and strangely stressed repeated labelling during media interviews used by the former Immigration Minister to denote boatpeople as "unlawful non-citizens", giving rise to the notion amongst millions of Australians as well as detention guards and DIMIA staff to think that it's "illegal" to come to Australia on your own steam and ask for asylum.

Related issues

A brief mention needs to be made of other issues intersecting with refugee assessment. This submission will only summarily mention the issues of language assessment and of dob-ins.

Finding qualified interpreters who were fluent in Dari, Farsi, Hazargi - the three languages used by Afghans - and English was nearly impossible. In the end, DIMIA drew many of its interpreters from the previous wave of Afghan refugees - those who had fled to Australia during the 1980s when Russia and the United States turned Afghanistan into yet another Cold War battleground. These were almost exclusively Pashtuns.

The problem for the Hazara Afghans, who made up the bulk of the asylum seeker population in detention, was the deep ethnic animosity and power difference that exists between the Pashtun and Hazara tribes.

It is not clear whether the Department of Immigration was unaware of these tensions or just unconcerned by them. Whatever the reason, interpreters and translators who were used extensively in Woomera, Port Hedland, Curtin and Nauru were Pashtun Afghans.

High-profile Melbourne barrister Julian Burnside QC has compared the use of Parshtoon language interpreters to aid in the assessment of refugee claims of Hazaras with putting a Nazi in charge of the refugee assessments of Jews.

dob-ins

Since The Palmer Report became public in July this year, we know that the DIMIA is a government department that has been for some time deeply devoid of measures of accountability, managerial checks and balances and systems of information review and confirmation - or conversely, void of systems that may lead to elimination or dismissal of information that cannot be confirmed.

In such a climate a situation may arise where an anonymous dob-in can develop its own life, remaining unconfirmed, and growing in importance and significance beyond any proportion related to its relevance, and more importantly, its credibility.

There is evidence of this happening - and it may have happened many more times than we are yet aware of, for example, it has not yet been ruled out that a false dob-in, for example by one of Ms Vivian Alvarez' former partners or husbands, may have led to convince the DIMIA that she was an illegal immigrant and thus should be deported. According to one of Australia's most renowned and experienced migration agents, Ms Marion Lê OAM, in a speech delivered in October 2004 at the Sydney Institute:

Poor Ali Bakhtiari was dobbed in. He was dobbed in, along with another person who became my client. The men were said to be brothers, Pakistani citizens rather than Afghani, guilty of giving false details of their families and nationalities to the DIMIA. I went all the way to the Afghanistan to prove that my client was who he said he was and I proved it. We have not, however, yet been able to find the identity of the dob-in. It's very complicated so just take it from me.

Dob-ins generally have nothing to do with terrorism but are often based on gossip - asylum seekers married to someone or not married to someone - very trivial stuff in fact, but untested and unrevealed can lead to people being detained and removed from Australia.

With the Afghani case-load, the DIMIA put a lot of faith in the now largely discredited language tests and dob-ins which led to many genuine Afghani asylum seekers being detained on suspicion of being Pakistani for four years before eventually being released on temporary three year protection visas (TPVs).[7]

Documents on one DIMIA file indicate that a number of unnamed informants have told the Department that the applicant is lying about his identity. While some informants, however, had apparently given similar information there were apparent inconsistencies. The Refugee Review Tribunal requested, from the DIMIA, details of the sources of these dob-ins but was advised that DIMIA is "under strict obligation to keep the identities of persons who are the sources in these circumstances completely confidential". Isn't that incredible?

There was another dob-in case of a young couple in Adelaide. Theirs is a very sad story. They fled to Australia from the Milosovic ethnic cleansing in 1999. They were terribly traumatised, came here and they are much loved by the local community who have supported them during the time they have had no work permits - over two years whilst they waited for an answer to their request for Ministerial intervention.

Someone dobbed them in. We didn't know this and we couldn't work out why Philip Ruddock would not intervene in this case. He kept saying to me, "I know you've put another letter in about that case but there's an allegation on the file". We put in another request for files under the Freedom of Information legislation (FOI). I've had a separate case on foot for the little girl in the family, so I decided to wait.

Then, back it came, an unanswered, unexplored dob-in, not a letter, but a file note recording that on a particular day a man who identified himself only by his first name and who left a mobile telephone number, walked into the office of the DIMIA in Sydney and said that Mrs A in South Australia (she's never been to Sydney) is living under a false name with her husband, and that a woman called Mrs B who is living with them is in reality her mother. Mrs B also had an application before the Tribunal. This information was passed to the Minister as fact. They were accused of very serious immigration fraud. They had, in other words, adopted false names, and were living with a woman who is supposed to be the mother of the wife who is also lying to the DIMIA and Tribunal.

Conclusions

From the material briefly presented above we can conclude that Australia's refugee assessment processes and structures should urgently change - were it to be the only supporting material available of what has taken place in the last five to ten years. It however isn't. There are "a thousand more stories" amongst an equal number of Australians who have worked with refugees and asylum seekers especially since the Tampa incident and the 2001 election and the passing of the Tampa Bills. Australia's refugee determination system is disturbingly lacking in the following areas:

It is extremely likely that the long duration of refugee assessment and consequently the time spent in detention centres is entirely a result of the abysmal refugee determination failures. Conversely, it is extremely unlikely that the intent expressed by Mr Malcolm Turnbull, Mr Mal Washer, the Attorney-General Hon Philip Ruddock and the Treasurer Hon Peter Costello to limit court appeals available to asylum claimants have any basis in a causal relationship to the duration of detention. Until we have a zero error rate in refugee determinations we simply cannot deny asylum seekers the right of an appeal - even if that means going all the way to the High Court.

It may well be true that people are spending an indeterminate, and in our opinion a totally unacceptable time locked away in detention centres, but if primary determination would have been without errors, professional, swift and fair, instead of seriously compromised with for example political pandering to the false notion of "illegality" we would have been able to release most people indeed 90% of the time within 90 days. And, that would save millions, possibly billions of dollars.

Recommendations

Project SafeCom recommends that refugee assessment systems are in urgent need of change and correction. These would need to include the following elements:

Final remarks

Project SafeCom proposes that the Migration Act be amended after the Inquiry receives all advice relating to the above submission. It is unacceptable that Australia, a country that seeks to boast about its human rights record is in such a shocking state in terms of its treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. While we do not claim to be "experts" and while this submission may not necessarily be perfect in the views of those with more knowledge of what has happened to refugees, we are as we always have been, a fierce and independent voice for justice and fairness.

For Project SafeCom
Jack H. Smit