Australia's Offshore Immigration Policy: Human Rights Violation

This essay critically examines Australia's offshore immigration policies, arguing that they represent a significant failure to protect human rights. Drawing on multiple sources, the essay highlights the inhumane conditions in offshore detention camps, including reports of murder, poor healthcare, and ...Read More

Australia’s Offshore Immigration Policy 1
THE AUSTRALIAN OFFSHORE IMMIGRATION POLICIES: A LOOK AT THE PLIGHT
OF PEOPLE WITH OFFSHORE ASYLUM SEEKERS IN AUSTRALIA AS A CASE STUDY
FOR FAILURE OF AUSTRALIAN LAW AND POLICY TO PROTECT SPECIAL GROUPS
By; Student’s Name
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Professor’s Name
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Australia’s Offshore Immigration Policy 2
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Discussion 3
Conclusion 6
Bibliography 7

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Introduction
Australia has in recent times come under unusual criticism over its immigration policy. A recent
report on a visit by Amnesty International’s Anna Neistat in Nauru, one of the islands which
hold camps for offshore immigrants into Australia, however, proved otherwise. Neistat describes
the conditions she witnessed in the camps as befitting the term “torture”. In fact, she reports that
what she witnessed left her ‘furious and desperate.’ In this island, and in Papua New Guinea and
other offshore camps used by Australia, men, women, and children suffer inhumane conditions
as they wait for their applications for asylum in Australia to be processed. The immigration
process takes long, sometimes months. Having been considered for a long time as one of the
favorite destinations for foreigners in the world, Australia is surprisingly falling out of favor as a
result of the policies its government is using to regulate immigration into the country (Human
Rights Watch, 2019).
This study seeks to demonstrate that Australia's migration policy for offshore arrivals has failed,
due to its violation of human rights. In using the immigration policies case the paper intends to
demonstrate that multiple Australian law are biased and discriminative, and that the government
‘sleeps’ while most of these laws and policy actually need changing.
Discussion
● To begin with, and which is the most unfortunate, is the murder of asylum seekers in the
offshore refugee detention camps. An example has been given in the media of an Iranian
citizen by the name of Reza Barati who sought asylum on Manus Island and who was
killed through lethal violence. This story received wide attention. A number of other
reports of the murder of refugees have surfaced through Australian and foreign media. In

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these reports, there is a lot of evidence suggesting the murders being committed as a
result of racial and even gender discrimination. It is very unfortunate for anyone to meet
the very death they are perhaps running away from, in a place where they expected
security. In so happening the policies used by Australia to regulate the numbers of
refugees coming into the country through the sea have failed, because one of the results
of their application is the murder of people seeking asylum, a violation of not only human
rights but also international law as well. This, is something that Evans (2016) is in
agreement with, only his study focuses on the failure of Australian law and policies to
prevent the government from being too punitive.
Secondly, the refugees face poor health services in the detention camps. This is a reflection of
the discrimination facing people with disability as the Australian Human Rights Commission
(2014) has in many times reported. The refugees’ situation is worsened by the fact that the
detention camps are neglected and do not, therefore, receive appropriate healthcare for the
wellbeing of the immigrants. Healthcare workers in the said camps face several challenges
themselves from this dilapidation. Multiple reports claim that have actually been pushed as far as
having to "resort to civil disobedience to meet their professional and ethical obligations towards
patients." Where health workers have themselves been pushed to the wall by policies and
hindered from fully using their ability to fulfill their professional obligations says a lot about the
means being used to curb the number of immigrants entering Australia, a reflection of the same
criticism it receives from the Australian Human Rights Commission.
Third, as a result of poor health services many refugees are facing mental issues ranging from
madness and other serious brain illnesses to trauma and depression. This is brought about by the
fact that they are being held as prisoners while most of them simply seek asylum. A lot of

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research has pointed to the long periods these people take in detention centers as a cause of
depression, especially because most of them committed no crime. It is without argument that this
is a process that remains a violation of human rights, and as such a straight failure because every
country is expected to uphold and ensure the protection of human rights. This carelessness from
the government is a similarity to the plight of many wrongly convicted people in Australia
(Dioso-Villa et al, 2016).
Children have not been spared the agony that comes about with the compulsory detention. One
would expect the Australian government to be a little lenient with children and give them more
protection from the ‘torture’ as researchers refer to it, but this is not the case. Analyses of media
coverage on the abuse and mistreatment of children in Australia’s Don Dale detention center,
narrate of disturbing images of young ones being forcibly subdued in the Youth detention center.
Numerous other cases of the abuse of children in the centres, by older people sometimes
including fellow detainees, have been reported in the offshore camps. What is the use of policies
that cannot even protect the weak, like children and people with diability in their blinded pursuit
of achieving minimum offshore migration into Australia?
Sexual and gender-based violence is the other ingredient in the recipe of policies that the country
is using to regulate immigration, which have contributed to their failure. As recent studies affirm,
previous research on this matter has always revolved around the general population of detention
centres whilst turning a blind eye to the experience of special groups such as women and
children and even people with disabilities. Harpur and Douglas (2014) are big critiques of the
violation of the violation of the human rights of special groups. Reports have emerged that
recently, women in the centre at Nauru have for instance been forced to give sexual favors to
guards in order to be allowed access to basic needs such as the showers. Many more reports have

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recently emerged in this line and it is indeed a sorry state of affairs that has even drawn criticism
from the United Nations and other Human Rights groups. If human beings have to be subjected
to such conditions, and adversely affecting the special groups, even if these policies do finally
manage to reduce the number of offshore immigrants, they can never be considered to have been
‘successful.’
Lastly, the long time and uncertainty that the refugees have to go through awaiting processing of
their applications for asylum stay in Australia raise questions on this process. Multiple
researchers describe this to be a point in the lives of these people where they are in a ‘standstill'
and in a ‘limbo.' They are neither aware of the progress of their applications nor the time that the
remaining procedure will take. They have been forced to depend only on hope. Even though
torture has become a part of them in the camps, they don’t have another option but to wait upon
mercy from onshore Australia. Detention that comes with torture is a miserable prospect for
anyone to face, but when it also has to come with long periods and uncertainty, then it points
towards a fault on the authority that came up with the policies. That results in disregard for
human rights, and no system can be considered successful without respecting human rights and
dignity.
Not everyone is finding fault with Australian policy on offshore immigration, nevertheless. Some
researchers have embraced the approach, opting to focus on the policies' rather merger
advantages. There are a few researchers with the opinion that Australia has developed one of the
‘strictest' policies in the world to control immigration into its borders. They opine that these
policies used by Australia can act as an example for Europe and North America, which they
claim, faces huge numbers of illegal immigrants. What all of them have turned a blind eye to, is
the gross violation of human rights in those detention camps. It is also quite unfortunate that

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these studies only view the situation as an experiment on immigration policy. This is, in the
opinion of this paper, is unacceptable because human life should not be used as a specimen in
any such ‘experiments.' Also, none are particularly saying much about the amount of time, which
is sometimes indefinite, that the asylum seekers have to wait for the processing — something
which this paper finds to be catastrophic. Human rights and dignity must always be respected.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is clear without a shade of doubt that Australia's immigration policies for
offshore arrivals are dangerous for asylum seekers; and they remain to be a violation of human
rights and dignity. It is also unfortunate that this situation reflects misdoing by the Australian
government on many other areas, from neglect of people with disabilities and wrongful
convictions. The United Nations may be the solution for many of these neglected groups.

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Bibliography
Australian Human Rights Commission, 2014. Equal before the law: Towards disability
strategies.
Dioso-Villa, R., 2016. 28. Investigation to exoneration: A systematic review of wrongful
conviction in Australia. Current Issues Crim. Just. P. 157.
Evans, R., 2016. Our Punitive Nation. Arena Magazine, pp.31-34.
Harpur, P. and Douglas, H., 2014. Disability and domestic violence: protecting survivors’ human
rights. Griffith Law Review, 23(3), 405-433.
Human Rights Watch, 2019. Australian Events of 2018 [online]. Available at
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/australia [Accessed 7 Jun. 2019].