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INTERNATIONAL

Unmasking Australia's boat-stopping deal with the Sri Lankan devil

  • 25 February 2015

There is a myth that labelling an issue as one of 'national security' somehow removes it 'beyond politics'. Salus reipublicae suprema lex, the safety of the state is the supreme law, as the old Latin tag has it, and all must rally to the flag.

Nothing illustrates the shallowness of this fiction better than Monday’s story by Amanda Hodge in The Australian. 

In it, she quotes the new Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, as claiming that Australia’s silence on Sri Lanka’s appalling human rights record was the price for Sri Lanka taking extra measures to prevent people fleeing the country.

In particular, the claim was that the Rajapakse government agreed to curb the involvement of parties linked to that government in assisting that flight and that Australia had cultivated relations with the government to the point where Mr Abbott refused even to meet a major opposition leader on his visit to the country last year. 

This is problematic on many levels. Australia, as a party to the Refugee Convention, has an obligation to grant protection to those fleeing persecution, rather than collude in preventing their flight. At a deeper level, though, it illustrates some of the major problems of seeking to remove human rights issues by reframing them as national security ones. 

By describing the prevention of asylum seeker arrivals as a national security issue (recall 'Operation Sovereign Borders', the militarised anti-asylum seeker drive and the secrecy which attends it, on 'operational grounds'), the Government has sought to wrap what are, effectively, political prejudices – even if they are shared by both main parties – in the cloak of national security. Who seriously believe that sheltering those genuinely at risk of persecution is a threat to national security or that the resulting lack of scrutiny is not very convenient for the Government? 

If the answer is said to be that this is too cynical and that such measures are necessary because there could be 'terrorists' hiding among those fleeing, a robust and fair refugee determination process should surely be the best defence. Art. 1F of the Refugee Convention denies refugee status to those who have committed a 'crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity', 'a serious non-political crime outside the country of refuge prior to his admission' or are guilty of 'acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations'. This clause is specifically designed, and
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