For a moment, Australia’s strict immigration policy seemed to be in doubt. In early November, the Australian Supreme Court ruled that the system in which immigrants without visas could be held indefinitely in detention centers violated the Constitution. The ruling came as a big surprise to the Australian government and put an end to twenty years of policy.
The case was brought by a Rohinya man who came to Australia as a refugee. His visa was revoked after he was convicted of sexually abusing a 10-year-old boy. When he served his sentence, the government could not deport him because the man is stateless. Other countries didn’t want him either. Therefore, he was detained indefinitely.
The Supreme Court ruled that the Australian government was violating his fundamental rights. It resulted in his immediate release, and that of 148 others in a similar situation.
Lawyer Alison Battison is representing more than 20 people who have been released since the court’s ruling, and 10 others who remain in custody. “The Supreme Court decision is a dramatic change in the Australian legal landscape,” she says on the phone.
Strict rules
The opposition capitalized on the chaos that followed the release. Peter Dutton, the leader of the conservative opposition Liberals party, said the government was releasing “murderers, rapists and pedophiles.” The government soon introduced strict rules to keep an eye on the released immigrants and, if possible, to put them back behind bars.
Last week, new laws were hastily introduced to preventively detain immigrants. These are people without a visa who have been convicted of a serious violent or sexual offense, punishable by a prison sentence of at least seven years. If the government can demonstrate that these people remain a danger to society even after serving their sentences, they can be held in detention centers. “The safety of the Australian community is of paramount importance,” Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said after the vote in Parliament.
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Electronic anklet
She challenges the image that the entire group consists of serious criminals. “The vast majority have not committed a serious crime. Sometimes it’s just traffic violations.” Yet they all have to adhere to the new rules, such as wearing an electronic ankle bracelet and a curfew. The government has allocated 153 million euros for the supervision of this group.
Migration is once again a major theme in Australia. It’s a country of migrants: more than half of Australians have at least one parent born in another country. The country still welcomes many people from other countries – this year net immigration is more than 510,000 people. This mainly concerns knowledge migrants, such as international students and highly educated people.
A recent poll shows that a majority of Australians think that’s too much. That is why Prime Minister Albanese promised to return to “sustainable” numbers. On Monday, his government presented a plan to more than halve the number of new immigrants, for example by imposing strict language requirements for foreign students.
Zero tolerance
It has always been difficult for asylum seekers and refugees to settle in Australia. The government issues around 20,000 humanitarian visas per year. But people who try to reach the land by boat cannot claim this. For more than ten years, there has been a zero-tolerance policy for people trying to reach Australia by boat. Anyone who dares to make the journey is stopped at sea and sent back. Nearly two hundred people have been returned to sea since the Labor government took office in May 2022.
For a long time, many refugees and asylum seekers were held in detention centers on two islands in the Pacific Ocean. Until the settlement on the Papua New Guinean island of Manus was declared illegal by the Supreme Court in 2016 and closed a year later. The detention center on the island state of Nauru is currently empty, but the Australian government is keeping open the possibility of taking people into custody here again.
The Australian slogan ‘stop the boats’ also caught on internationally. In the United Kingdom, the text was copied verbatim by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. He is a strong supporter of the controversial Rwanda deal in which asylum seekers await and complete their procedure in Rwanda.
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Geert Wilders has also been inspired by Australia’s tough policies in the past. “Australia handles things in a civilized, sensible, but tough manner. We have to do that too,” Wilders said in a video on YouTube in 2015.
Lawyer Battison has some advice for international politicians who view the Australian system with interest. “Do not do it. It doesn’t work, and it’s incredibly expensive,” she says. The detention of immigrants costs the government at least 260,000 euros per person annually. “You have to think, what do you hope to achieve with this policy? Because you cannot completely stop immigration and refugees.”
Despite the newly introduced laws, the cracks in Australia’s immigration system have not yet been repaired. Lawyers do not rule out that the laws are unconstitutional. Two new cases have already been filed with the Supreme Court against the tightened rules in recent weeks.
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