Australia’s plan to pay countries to accept its deported non-citizens is amongst a raft of measures under scrutiny at a Senate inquiry that legal experts and advocates have panned as undermining the rule of law.
The bill was “horrifying”, a Kurdish-Iranian musician who was detained in Papua New Guinea for several years before being released for medical evacuation in Australia five years ago told the parliamentary committee hearing.
“What has happened to this government? This bill is horrifying and will harm many people like me who call this country home,” AAP reported Farhad Bandesh as saying in his opening testimony at the inquiry on Thursday.
“Under this law, if I am sent to a third country and am tortured in detention, I will not be brought to safety.
“There are more than 1000 people like me in Australia who suffered through the horrors of Manus and Nauru. Only 450 people will be resettled in New Zealand.
“The rest of us could be sent to third countries under this bill.”
The Albanese government has not detailed which countries it has been in talks with about accepting deportees.
A bill that passed the House of Representatives seeks to amend the Migration Act by deporting non-citizens, including not just those convicted of crimes, and to pay third countries for their part in the removal regime.
It would grant extensive immunity to government officials and those in third countries and reverse protection findings for refugees.
Bandesh, who is on a bridging visa, said he was one of hundreds of people injured in riots on Manus Island in 2014 where his friend Reza Barati, a Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker, was killed.
Several human rights and legal groups, including the Law Council of Australia, slammed the sweeping powers of the bill.
“Detaining individuals pre-emptively (in Australia or overseas) to prevent them from committing future crimes must not become normalized in an otherwise free and liberal society,” council president Greg McIntyre told the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation committee.
His colleague Carina Ford said there were no protections in the bill with third countries potentially sending refugees to their home countries where they could be persecuted.
“Sometimes the removals process goes wrong,” she said.
“There is really no jurisdiction Australia has in foreign countries where things go wrong.”
They called for the bill to be scrapped.
The amendments came after a landmark ruling found indefinite immigration detention was unlawful, triggering the release of 200 non-citizens with varying criminal offences.
Released immigration detainees were strapped with ankle monitors and slapped with curfews.
The High Court earlier in November struck down a case brought by a stateless Eritrean refugee known as YBFZ ruling it punitive and an over-reach by the government, which prompted Labor to rush the bill to parliament.
The Human Rights Law Centre said the proposed legislation was “constitutionally unsound” because of its broad powers that could ensnare thousands of people including children on bridging visas, even if they have not committed any criminal offences.
Ford of the Law Council warned of the legal, political and financial consequences of the bill passing referring to the now-shuttered offshore detention center on Manus Island and the other in Nauru.
“We don’t seem to learn from the consequences and the damage of what has occurred as a result so it’s nearly like history repeating itself.”