Alexander Downer has been appointed to a UK authorities panel to supervise its plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, prompting accusations that the previous Australian international affairs minister is getting used to “launder” the controversial coverage.
The brand new committee will present “impartial” oversight of the five-year deal between the UK and Rwanda beneath which asylum seekers who arrive within the UK could be despatched to Rwanda on a one-way ticket – a plan critics have condemned as merciless and unworkable. The appointment was made by Priti Patel in certainly one of her closing acts as residence secretary.
Downer, as Australia’s international minister for greater than a decade and a former excessive commissioner to the UK, has been a daily and outstanding defender of Australia’s offshore detention regime for boat-borne asylum seekers.
In April he appeared in a UK Dwelling Workplace video selling the British authorities’s immigration plan, and in February was handpicked to assessment the nation’s border power – an appointment British unions described as deeply regarding, citing Downer’s function in Australia’s “inhumane” immigration insurance policies.
Downer was appointed as an “immigration skilled at present serving as Govt Chair on the Worldwide College for Authorities, King’s School London”, in keeping with a authorities announcement.
“I’m proud to be working with the Rwandan authorities on this world-leading coverage,” Patel mentioned, “and our new monitoring committee will play a key function in holding each governments to account so we are able to ship on our commitments to the British public and save lives.”
The UK’s deliberate offshore processing association with Rwanda – often called the UK-Rwanda migration and financial growth partnership – is but to maneuver a single particular person offshore. The primary scheduled deportation flight was cancelled in June after an the European court docket of human rights issued an injunction, and the scheme is now being challenged within the UK’s excessive court docket.
The UK’s plan relies on the “Australian mannequin” – Australia’s offshore processing scheme, which has been working, in its second iteration, for practically a decade.
Australia’s offshore processing regime endures solely on the Pacific island of Nauru, after its detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island was dominated unlawful and Australia was compelled to pay tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} to refugees in compensation.
The offshore system has been beset by controversy: together with at the very least 12 deaths, together with homicide by guards and a number of other suicides; violence towards asylum seekers and refugees; systemic sexual abuse of kids; in addition to insufficient medical and psychiatric care.
Greater than 200 refugees and asylum seekers stay held inside the offshore system: most have been held for greater than 9 years, with no speedy prospect of resettlement.
Downer was Australia’s international minister through the 11 years of the Howard authorities when offshore processing was launched. Beneath its first iteration folks despatched offshore had been in the end allowed to completely settle in Australia. Now, nonetheless, it’s Australian authorities coverage that any particular person despatched offshore won’t ever be allowed to settle within the nation.
Downer has persistently defended Australia’s asylum insurance policies and advocated for his or her adoption elsewhere. In a speech to the Henry Jackson Society final month he mentioned he had suggested the British authorities to forestall asylum seekers from bodily reaching the UK, or eradicating them in the event that they arrived.
“Put them onto steady craft and drive them again to France – that’s the easy resolution and would destroy the smugglers’ enterprise mannequin in per week,” Downer mentioned, including: “Wanting that, ensuring they’ll’t settle within the UK beneath any circumstances – the [agreement the] authorities negotiated with Rwanda – is an effective resolution as nicely.”
Downer’s appointment “makes a joke of impartial scrutiny”, mentioned Eva Sêrro Spiekermann from the advocacy group Folks and Planet.
“In Australia he was a number one defender of a detention and deportation regime that locked up folks on the transfer, rode roughshod over human rights, and value lives. His appointment is supposed to problem abuse in UK border coverage, however as an alternative launders it.”
Nazek Ramadan, the director of Migrant Voice UK, mentioned the UK’s plan to create an offshore processing system for asylum seekers in Rwanda was deeply flawed.
“We should always welcome folks looking for security, not power them onto flights to Rwanda,” Ramadan mentioned. “This ill-considered, deport-first-ask-questions-later scheme is a authorized, ethical, and monetary catastrophe, which is why it’s falling aside.
“It’s a mark of desperation that the so-called impartial panel contains somebody who pushed an analogous scheme in Rwanda with brutal penalties.”
Australia’s offshore processing system has been promoted as having “stopped the boats” bearing asylum seekers reaching Australian shores to assert safety.
However authorities figures present that within the first full 12 months after offshore processing was reintroduced, extra folks arrived in Australia by boat looking for asylum than at every other time in historical past..
No new asylum seeker or refugee has been despatched to offshore processing since 2014.