Attacking the Refugee Convention: The Rudd Offensive
By MatthewDonovan | | comments |
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is due to announce changes to Australia's refugee policy this afternoon; in light of this, Dr. Binoy Kampmark looks at what he sees as attempts to water down international refugee protections.
COULD THERE BE a global revolution on refugee law in the offing? Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who has commenced his effort to survive the next election, has began an all out offensive against the Refugee Convention. This United Nations document remains the great headache of policy makers across the globe.
Sacrosanct, inviolable, obligations such as non-refoulement have been the great eyesore of restraint on governments. Like irate children, they don’t like it. Sometimes, they ignore it.
The revisers have their euphemistic labels: they want “reform”. They want to modernise. They want to flip the cart on the rights lobby. Reform remains the weasel word of the radical conservative prat. As Australian governments have made conservatism the stable orthodoxy, Rudd had deigned to adopt a strategy that is – like him – new but old, revolutionary but musty. Should he win in this amorally untidy effort, it will be, as one backbencher termed it, “unity by exhaustion”.
Of course, the techniques in the Rudd arsenal are hardly new.
The Howard Government, Australia’s own Thatcherite imitation, made slandering both the Refugee Convention and refugees habitual and acceptable. From low fashion to high fashion, rubbishing new arrivals, especially by boat, has not become so much de rigueur as instinctive.
'...it was developed in and for a different era. Its focus is the resulting problems that have been identified since the late 1980s with the operation of the Convention in Western countries'.
Sharpening the focus on the 'illegal' arrivals at the end of the 1990s, the report noted how Australia, disappointingly, was 'constrained' by how it could deal with them. Eviscerate the old; remove the cobwebs.
What had so significantly changed?
'The use by the boat people of people smugglers to circumvent the visa and border controls has prompted Australia to join other countries in openly questioning the operation and continuing viability of the Convention itself.'
The logic here: if an obligation is onerous and burdensome, or a right hard to observe, it should be scrapped, lifted, adjusted, moderated. The Convention definition of a refugee was 'outdated' along with 'its notion of exile as a solution to refugee problems'. It did not offer a 'flexible response' to a complex problem.
There was no obligation to share burdens between states. There was an 'inequity' in terms of outcomes between 'camp' and 'Convention' refugees. The more mobile, the more adventurous and, overall, the more desperate, were being rewarded. Never mind the deaths, the appalling loss of life on the seas, travelling between transit states.
Around the same time, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw claimed that the Convention was drafted and signed in an era where:
“Intercontinental travel was rare, difficult and expensive. Fifty years on, new technology, global communications and cheap international travel have all contributed to a world where rapid long-distance migration is a realistic operation.”
Straw’s language resembles that of an unenthusiastic travel agent keen to exclusively serve first class customers and toffs. Poorer applicants need not apply.
The Rudd of 2013 has latched on to that old theme and is laying things out with the trowel of a faux reformer. Experts with weasel words use genteel, soap sud expressions. An effort to be “benign” in a genuine attempt to be callous. The campaign is being made global, even though the main thrust of any change remains a rich man’s effort (suggestively “Western”) to stomp on the poor. “Turning back the boats” has become as ubiquitous an expression as Japan’s “sphere of co-prosperity” – every effort will be made to realise it, even if corners are not so much cut as annihilated. After all, as the opposition leader Tony Abbott has termed it, the arrival of refugees by boat to Australia is “a national emergency”.
The human faces that have been forgotten in this increasingly political debate. (Image courtesy news.com.au/Renee Nowytarger)
To that end, Rudd has suggested a true bureaucrat’s formula. Stemming the number of boat arrivals can be done through a “three-pronged” shift, involving national, regional and global approaches. He has openly told the press gallery that the “effectiveness” of the Convention is now under review. The Refugee Review Tribunal has also been instructed to prioritise claims between those who have authentic identity documents and those who either have false documents or do not “co-operate” (Sydney Morning Herald, Jul 18).
In all of this, the darkest of trends emerges. Anyone who believes that inviolable rights, be it a local bill of rights or the so called “international” bill of rights, are the evocations of conscience, are the true conservatives. Such rights are there, not to be flexibly deflected, but to be applied with as much faith as is needed. When the law falls silent, the vicious shall reign.
The saboteurs are the “new” conservatives who believe in radical projects, undertaken with nihilistic enthusiasm. They man the draw bridge and unleash drones against their own citizens. They hold the signatures, electronic or actual, penned on cheap paper and even cheaper promises. They come in the form of such figures as Tony Blair, a supposedly “progressive” politician who was also happy to consider taking the knife to the refugee system. They have the guns to turn back the boats.
One of the greatest corpses of this project will be the Refugee Convention. The ossuary, in time, will prove a heavily stacked one.
