Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study.

Campbell (2014, p. 28) asserts that individuals seeking asylum are not outlaws, yet they
are criminally charged in Australia. In spite of this, Australia continues to enforce a policy that
demands any individual who enters or remains in its territory illegally to be confined until either
their visa application is finalized or they are deported from the country. According to Taylor,
asylums who are detained are those who illegally arrive by plane and boat, and comprise many
who suffered trauma and torture, the sick, the elderly, children and pregnant women (2015, p.
333). Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study. In recent years, reports have emerged that detainees are engaging in riots, hunger strikes and committing self-mutilation acts from frustrations arising from long periods of detentions in environments that the Australian community is increasingly acknowledging as sub- standard.
The policy has received wide criticism both domestically and globally – from HREOC,
Australia’s own human rights watchdog and other human rights as well as global organizations –
especially about the detention of children (Begg & Öğüt, 2014, p. 4). Nonetheless, far from
improving the detention policy, the Australian authorities has significantly reinforced it – making
it nearly impossible for individuals seeking asylum to access data about their rights under the
laws of Australia in order to access legal advice, to have courts review their detention , or to
make protected visa applications (Briskman, 2013, p. 10). Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study. At the same time, the Australian government has strictly regulated the media and public access to dentition facilities.

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In addition, the Australian authorities has now enforced a policy of confining vessels that
carry asylum seekers entering the territorial waters of Australia, taking into custody asylum
seekers and expatriating them to South Pacific countries such as Nauru, where they are
confined awaiting processing (Taylor, 2015, p. 341). Since these locations are located outside
Australian soil, individuals detained there have no legal right under the laws of Australia to apply for refugee status, no access to legal advice, no rights to appeal against adverse conclusions that
affect them and no warranty for sound processing for refugee status. These offshore detention
facilities are not accessible easily to the media nor are not subject to independent examination by
the general Australian public. Presently, there is no other nation that has such a rigid mandatory
detention policy of all those who enter the national illegally irrespective of their condition or
status (Pickering & Weber, 2014, p. 1006). Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study.
The Rise of Mandatory Detention
Marshall, Pillai and Stack (2013, p. 55) explain that the policy on mandatory detention
developed over two and half decades in conjunction with the policy of Australia towards onshore
refugee applicants. The migration laws of Australia are anchored in the constitution of Australia
which authorizes the commonwealth parliament to make rules for the order, good and peace of
the Australian government with respect to, among other things, emigration and immigration
(Fleay, Hartley & Kenny, 2013, p. 473). Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study. As the Australian High Court interpreted, (McKay,
2013, p. 25) this empowers the commonwealth parliament to make laws about the handling of
non-citizens, including their admission, detention, stay and repatriation. Also important is the
tenet of common law that foreigners are not to be handled as criminals and should not be
confined without proper authorization conferred by legislation. The policy of mandatory
detention towards unauthorized entry immediately strengthened in the mid-1970s when it
became a nation of first asylum (Bessant, 2002, p. 17). Initially, the policy aimed at tightening
border control and penalizing those behind the illegal entry or transport of individuals into
Australian soil.
Marshall, Pillai and Stack (2013, p. 57) contend that towards, the end of the 1980s, the
Australian government started to direct its mandatory detention policy to punishing asylum seekers themselves, as a deterrence strategy and for safeguarding national security. In essence,
Australia does not wish to be the nation of first asylum, but favors to allow ingress to the nation
through an orderly structure that it regulates. Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study. On the one hand, this obscuring of policy imperatives between national security needs and international law obligations on the other, has seen international law consistently subordinate to national security and has resulted in the present mandatory detention policy of asylum seekers arriving illegally into Australia. Prior to the mid- 1970s, the entry of asylum seekers was uncommon in Australia, according to Bagaric and Pathinayake (2012, p. 496). In this period, no formal structure for evaluating claims to refugee condition or status existed; the permission of an arrival permit was solely under the minister’s discretion as prescribed then by the Migration Act (Pickering & Weber, 2014, p. 1015). Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study. Arising
from the end of the Vietnamese war and the forced economic closing off of the Communist
Southeast Asia countries, large populations started fleeing on boat to neighboring states
(Briskman, 2013, p. 12). Suddenly, Australia found itself faced with possible refugee
applications as a nation of first asylum. In reaction, the government of Australia established a
more regulated structure for the processing refugee applications, although the minister still
retained the discretion to grant refugee conditions. Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study. As such, there was no compulsory detention system for asylum applicants – asylum seekers were contained in processing facilities until identification assessment and final evaluation of their claims (Begg & Öğüt, 2014, p. 7).
Successful applicants were given a permanent or temporary entry permit. Unsuccessful
applicants were repatriated back to their country of origin. Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study.
Taylor argue that Australia established an organized immigration system as part of a
globally agreed plan after the inflow of ethnic Chinese who were being evicted from Vietnam
during the 1978- 79 Sino – Vietnamese war (2015, p. 345). Nonetheless, ongoing economic and ethnic challenges in Vietnam coupled with the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam meant that the
population fleeing rapidly outmatched the allocated numbers. Some Asia Pacific nations
responded to this influx by denying ingress to the ‘boat population.’ The Australian government
amended the Migration Act in 1980 as a reaction to the ingress of some 2, 000 boat people,
thereby providing a formal legal platform through which the minister had the sole discretion to
evaluate refugee condition in accordance to the international refugee convention and his ability
to grant an ingress permit (Campbell, 2014, p. 29). Simultaneously, McKay (2013, p. 26) notes
that, the Immigration Act 1980 vastly increased the commonwealth officials’ powers to board,
search and detain vessels as well as to nab and detain owners, charterers, masters, and agents of
vessels involved in the transport of illegal entries. Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study.
Up to mid- 1980s, the number of individuals seeking asylum had sharply declined, but in
1988 and 1989, asylum seekers again increased sharply, instigated by disturbances including the
collapse of the Cold War, events in China and the Vietnamese famine (Fleay, Hartley & Kenny,
2013, p. 487 – 491). Once again, countries within the pacific realm called for a global conference
to help in resolving the problem. The resulting global conference regarding the Indo- Chinese
refugees sanctioned the Comprehensive Plan of Action (Briskman, 2013, p. 13). The CPA
expected Vietnam to curb illegitimate departures in exchange for financial help and established a
timetable for the return of those individuals seeking asylum from the Southeast Asia camps who
were not positively evaluated by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees for asylum.
However, this did not curb the rising numbers of boats entering in Australian waters – ironically,
in some instances caused by the secondary escape occasioned by fear of the impending shutdown
of the camps and their coerced return to their country of origin. From this period, the Australian authorities demonstrated rising hostility towards illegal entries, enforcing a strategy of direct
deterrence anchored on compulsory detention (Bagaric & Pathinayake, 2012, p. 501). Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study.
The 1989 Migration Act reinforced border control and inaugurated a form of compulsory
detention as positive legislation (Taylor, 2015, p. 357). The law prescribed that a foreigner
became an illegitimate entrant on arrival to Australian soil unless they possessed a legitimate
entry permit, or the Migration Act authorized their continued stay, or they had exited at the end
of their ingress permit. In 1992, the Australian authorities pushed for the amendment of the
Migration Act according to Bessant (2002, p. 21). Retrospectively, the act legalized the detention
of applicants. In essence, the 1992 act created a new categorization of a designated individual.
This rule limited the detention period to 273 days (Bessant, 2002, p. 22; McKay, 2013, p. 24;
and, Fleay, Hartley & Kenny, 2013, p. 493). Also the 1992 amendment introduced charges that
detained immigrants were supposed to pay upon release. At the same time, illegitimate non-
citizens who had antecedently been legally in Australia were entitled for a bridging permit,
whereas unauthorized border entries were not (Marshall, Pillai & Stack, 2013, p. 55 – 56). This
means that boat arrivals continued to experience differential handling to that of other illegitimate
non- citizens. Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study.

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The Impact of Detention on Australian Asylum Seekers
It is no doubt that Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is widely
acknowledged global convention in the history of humankind. Campbell (2014, p. 29) notes that
most nations in the globe are UDHR signatories and Australia played a pivotal role in its
establishment. The declaration asserts that all individuals have a right to apply asylum in any
country to which they gain entry (Briskman, 2013, p. 9). However, when desperate individuals
are fleeing persecution and war- torn nations enter Australia, they are locked up in conditions not different to correctional institutions. Begg and Öğüt (2014, p. 6) observe that the UNHCR has
listed conditions in detention centers of Australia as violative to human dignity. The UNHCR
committee has established consistently the compulsory detention system to be breach of
fundamental human rights standards. Other Australian and international authorities and agencies
have also expressed consistently grave concern regarding several aspects of the mandatory
detention regime pursued by Australia. Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study.
The psychological ramifications of prolonged compulsory detention on children, women
and men are severe. Aspects such as risk of deportation, bewildering legal processes and
increased processing period all contribute to psychological health issues including depression
and anxiety (Taylor, 2015, p. 351). These situations result in protest, behavioral and self-
harming breakdowns. All women who give birth in Australia’s detention centers from Christmas
Island to Villawood have reported sings of post-natal depression (Pickering & Weber, 2014, p.
1023). Even children, who are the most vulnerable section of the society, are not excluded from
the impacts of long detention periods. A case in point is the 2001 case of a 10-year-old girl from
Iran who fled with terrible suffering with her parents. The family languished in an Australian
detention facility for three years (Bessant, 2002, p. 27). The girl stopped eating, caring for herself
and on one fateful night she hanged herself in her small room when her parents ate dinner. The
case of this young girl is just one of the countless victims of the Australian indefinite, mandatory
detention of asylum applicants. Yet, the experience of these applicants is an issue of apathy to
many Australians. Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study.
The opposition and the media have been influenced heavily in the preparation, execution
and continuation of Australia’s mandatory detention scheme. Since the Tampa incident in 2001
under the regime of Howard, asylum seekers and refugees have been reduced to labels and numbers in an effort by media outlets and political parties in order to dehumanize them
(Briskman, 2013, p. 28). These symbols include ‘boat people’, ‘illegal immigrants’ as well as
‘queue jumpers.’ Rather than being understood and considered as what they are – desperate
individuals fleeing torture and persecution seeking refuge in Australia as enshrined under the
UDHR. The myths that surround individuals seeking asylum as individuals who are either
‘terrorists’ or economic refugees are supported by media outlets, instead of dispelling them
because they are mere myths. Statistics reveal that 92.5 percent of asylum seekers entering
Australia are established to be genuine refugees (Taylor, 2015, p. 333). Notably, no single
asylum seeker has been linked to terrorism. The Australian media is spreading mongering
campaigns suggesting that asylums are arriving in large numbers and that Australia is the leading
destination of refugees in the globe. For example, in 2009, the number of individuals who sought
refuge in the United Kingdom were 45, 197 as compared to the Australian number of 8, 427 as
asserted by Begg and Öğüt (2014, p. 7). On a yearly basis, Australia takes in about 13, 750
asylums. This represents 0.1 percent of the global population of about 15 million asylum seekers.
Yet, on the global wealth rank, Australia is ranked at number 10. Ironically, poorest nations hold
about 80 percent of the global refugee population (Bagaric & Pathinayake, 2012, p. 511 and
Marshall, Pillai & Stack, 2013, p. 55).
Fleay, Hartley and Kenny (2013, p. 493) explain that these myths backed the opposition,
the media and reacted to by the Australian authorities have resulted in harsher and more stringent
policies aimed at ‘securing’ Australian borders. The media, by pandering fear and failing to
accurately report, has had significant impact in the determining of the public opinion regarding
immigration, as a result public opinion and the media can frequently be aligned. The ‘Malaysia
Solution’ is the most recent policy related to asylum seekers initiated by the government of Gillard in order to deter asylums from entering the Australian territory by boat as well as
protecting the country’s borders (McKay, 2013, p 24). Under this policy, asylum seekers arriving
to Australia by boat from Malaysia will have to repatriated back to their homeland as their
refugee status are being evaluated. Rather than focusing more on political posturing, the
Australian authorities, the opposition and the media needs to face the real issue: compulsory
detention is not a suitable long term solution to the refugee problem. The policy is inhumane. It
endangers the psychological health of hundreds of vulnerable refugees. This policy is
unnecessary.

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Research Gap
There is a lot of contention surrounding the legitimacy of asylum seekers in Australia.
There are numerous agreements, recommendations, decisions and instruments made under global
law that have suggested that the Australian mandatory detention scheme of asylums breaches
global law standards. Despite this overwhelming evidence of on retrogressive immigration policy
pursued by Australia, little research has been carried out regarding the impact of Australia’s
mandatory detention regime. A significant portion of previous research conducted has laid more
emphasis on the policy and not its impact on the women, children and men who are confined to
offshore camps where they cannot lay asylum claims to Australia since they are not within the
Australian territory. From the examination of literature above it is no doubt that the
psychological ramifications of prolonged compulsory detention on children, women and men are
severe. Aspects such as risk of deportation, bewildering legal processes and increased processing
period all contribute to psychological health issues including depression and anxiety. The policy
has had a huge impact on women since even those who have given birth in these environments
have showed signs of post natal depression. In addition, the policy has had more negative ramifications on children. This overwhelming evidence on the challenges that detained asylums
experience in Australia, there is need to conduct more research on the topic. Australian Asylum Seekers Case Study.

Bibliography

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