MADELINE GLEESON: There's one country like no other when it comes
to human rights and the treatment of refugees.
This country has signed up to all the international conventions
and on the surface appears to be a liberal democracy like any other.
But beneath that facade, it has no binding legal framework
for human rights and has been the subject
of multiple referrals to the International Criminal
Court for crimes against humanity.
UN expert bodies have repeatedly found that the country's
refugee policies violate international law.
Yet these policies remain, and some people who speak
publicly about them face the risk of imprisonment.
The country I'm talking about is Australia.
I'm Madeline Gleeson, a human rights lawyer researching
Australia's offshore processing of refugees.
I'll explain why offshore processing of refugees is
both ineffective and inhumane in under 10 minutes.
As a freshly qualified human rights lawyer.
I started my career working abroad,
first in Southeast Asia and then in Geneva.
I had assumed that a career in International Human
Rights Law would keep me far from home,
closer to the conflicts and problems in other parts of the world.
But the actions of the Australian Government would soon
see me return home to challenge the implementation
of Australia's offshore processing policy for refugees,
which recommenced in 2012.
So who are refugees?
A refugee is a person who has a well-founded fear
of being persecuted for reasons of race,
religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group,
or political opinion.
They are outside their country of origin
and they're unable or due to that fear,
unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of that country.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust in the II World War,
countries agreed to recognize the right of all people to seek
asylum and to be protected against return to persecution.
Australia helped draft the Refugee Convention,
which sets out the definition of refugee and
the need to protect them from return to harm,
as well as a requirement that countries not penalize people for
fleeing places where their life and freedom are threatened.
It's like allowing an ambulance to speed
when you're fleeing for your life,
you just get out by whatever means possible.
You may not have a visa, but it is legal to seek asylum.
This is international law, which 149 countries signed on to,
including Australia.
This has helped people to reach safety after fleeing wars
like those in Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine.
It has helped people escape serious human rights violations when they're
persecuted because of some inherent features of who they are.
Imagine you and your family need to flee your home due to
war or some other threat that has been made against you.
You fear for your lives.
The escape routes open to you are limited.
They may only be one way out.
And when you finally cross into that next country,
you may find that it is not safe for you there either.
In a desperate bid to reach safety,
you might risk at all and board a small,
crowded, unseaworthy boat bound for Australia.
You know that many do not survive that journey.
But you have no other option.
Between 2012 and 2014.
People who took this journey to Australia
were intercepted and rather than
being brought to Australia to have their refugee status verified,
they were taken to other countries in the Pacific.
Either the small island nation of Nauru or
the remote Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.
This is known as offshore processing,
a policy designed to punish asylum seekers who attempt
to arrive in Australia by boat and discourage
others from making the same journeys.
As a human rights lawyer I had questions.
We had seen offshore processing before back in 2001,
but this time around the level of secrecy was unprecedented.
Flights left Australia and people disappeared into the ether.
Who had been taken?
How are they being treated?
Were their protection claims being processed?
Was there any independent oversight?
Were international laws being followed?
Essentially was any of this lawful?
Finding out even basic information was extremely difficult due to
the decision to send these people to remote places and out of sight.
The fact that they were locked away in harsh and closed
detention facilities without access to the outside
world and restrictions the Australian Government
placed on information about offshore processing.
Keeping people offshore was a way to keep them out of
mind and out of reach for the rest of Australia.
Australia went to great lengths to keep secret what
was happening in its offshore prison camps.
But the truth always comes out in the end.
Slowly, lawyers like me, advocates and international
organisations chipped away at the walls of secrecy.
The people inside the camps themselves found
ingenious ways to get their stories out.
And then, after a deadly riot in 2014,
when one man was murdered and many seriously injured,
a parliamentary inquiry blew the lid off what
was really happening on Manus Island.
And after that, there was no more hiding
what was being done in our name.
Everything we have learned since then indicates that offshore processing
is harmful and it does not work to deter migration by sea.
Within months of re-introducing offshore processing in August 2012,
the offshore detention centres had already
hit capacity and the government
was forced to allow most people arriving by boat to remain in Australia.
Successive governments sought to make the policy
harsher in the hope that that might work.
But within about a year of reintroducing the policy,
it was evident that this strategy was not an effective deterrent.
Australia stopped transferring people to Manus Island and Nauru
in 2014 and no new arrivals have been sent offshore since.
Yet the policy drags on because the Australian
Government stubbornly refuses to provide
the people who arrived back in 2013 and 2014
with a permanent settlement solution here.
The vast majority of these people are back in Australia now,
having been medically evacuated amid spiralling
health crises offshore in 2018 and 2019.
Around 200 people remain offshore nine years later,
still waiting for the Australian Government to grant them a visa of.
Find them somewhere else safe to live.
Does offshore processing stop the boats and discourage
people from seeking asylum by sea?
No.
In the first 12 months, we saw more people arrive in Australia by
boat seeking asylum than at any other time in history or since.
Does offshore processing save lives?
No.
It destroys them.
18 people have died.
At least six people reportedly committed suicide and at least one
was murdered in a system that was supposedly going to save lives.
Are people in offshore processing treated humanely?
Those who survived offshore processing were exposed to significant harm,
described by some as a fate worse than death.
People have been deeply traumatised.
Some have experienced irreversible harm as
a result of their treatment offshore.
The children sent offshore and locked up in these cruel
camps may never recover from what was done to them.
One Iraqi father, who survived living in a war zone,
said that he had never experienced anything
like his detention on Manus Island.
He said if we had died in the ocean, that would have been better.
Another said, Although we are alive, we are dead inside.
There were no exemptions for offshore processing
for children or other vulnerable groups.
Babies and children are exposed to extreme levels of
abuse and trauma in the offshore processing centres.
No political objective justifies that level of harm to young people.
This ineffective and inhumane policy is also expensive.
A conservative estimate is that offshore processing costs Australia
roughly $1 billion a year and this number hasn't decreased,
even as the vast majority of people subject to
the policy have been evacuated to Australia.
All the evidence points to offshore processing not working for its
intended purpose and having these extremely negative impacts.
But despite this, the UK and Denmark also wish to implement it.
It's my job as a researcher and a human rights lawyer,
not just to ask these questions and gather evidence to answer them,
but to do what I'm doing now, to speak up and to ensure that
Australia's bad policies are not picked up elsewhere.
We do this by giving evidence to UK parliamentarians to
encourage them to learn from Australia's mistakes.
And I'm speaking up now to you.
Offshore processing should never have been introduced in Australia.
It is long overdue to end and Australia's mistakes
should not be repeated elsewhere.
It is up to all of us to ask questions and speak up about these issues
to ensure that people who are offshore are never out of mind,
and those who have been brought back to Australia are permitted
to remain here safe and protected from the harms they fled.