Honouring our promise to restore integrity to our refugee assessment process

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Wednesday, 25 June 2014

The Coalition Government introduced a Bill in the Parliament today which honours an election promise to provide enhanced integrity measures in the assessment of asylum claims, in particular to deny visas to those who throw their documents away, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, the Hon Scott Morrison said.

'Australians need to be confident that those who are found to be refugees are in fact who they say they are and that if asylum seekers do not cooperate with the government to establish their identity they should not be given the benefit of the doubt,' Minister Morrison said.

'The previous Labor government ran a tick and flick assessment process which gave the benefit of the doubt to asylum seekers who often arrived in Australia without identity documentation, despite in many cases travelling into our region by air before boarding boats.

'The Migration Amendment (Protection and Other Measures) Bill 2014 ensures that ultimate responsibility for establishing identity as part of a refugee claim lies with an asylum seeker and that they provide sufficient evidence to support their claims.

'The Bill would ensure that asylum seekers who do not cooperate with the government to establish their identity, such as by throwing their documents away, will not be given the benefit of a protection visa. The amendments will make it clearly the responsibility of a person who comes to this country seeking protection to establish their own claims to be a refugee and to do so at the beginning of the refugee assessment process.

'The Bill will also bring Australia’s assessment of non-refoulement obligations under the Convention Against Torture and Other Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in line with Canada, the United States and Switzerland by requiring a higher threshold in which someone engages those obligations.

'The threshold in which our non-refoulement obligations are engaged under the CAT and ICCPR will return to a 'more likely than not' risk of harm occurring to an individual, rather than a 'real chance' which can be as low as a ten per cent risk.

'The previous government had applied the 'more likely than not' test to assessments against the CAT and ICCPR however they had not legislated the test and a court ruling defaulted to the lesser test and lowered the bar.

'This Bill seeks to set the bar at the level Labor was using in government enabling the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to apply that test consistent with the government’s intention. The 'real chance' test for Refugee Convention assessments is not affected by this change.

'The changes in the Migration Amendment (Protection and Other Measures) Bill will ensure public confidence in Australia’s capacity to assess claims for asylum in the interests of this country and against the interests of those who show bad faith. These changes uphold the importance of integrity and the establishment of identity and increased efficiency in our protection processing system,' Minister Morrison said.

See: Index of Media Releases

URL:http://www.minister.immi.gov.au/media/sm/2014/sm215807.htm
Last update: Thursday, 26 June 2014 at 09:17 AEST