Refugee right of appeal threatened

Refugee right of appeal threatened

By Jon Land

The Howard government is preparing to restrict refugees' right of appeal with a bill to be put to parliament later this month. The migration bill will include a "privative clause", designed to make it more difficult for refugees to appeal in the Federal Court against decisions of the Refugee Review Tribunal.

The tribunal considers cases of asylum seekers who have been refused refugee status by the immigration department. If the tribunal rejects their case, the applicant can appeal in the courts. The proposed bill could affect 7000 cases currently awaiting consideration by the tribunal. Since July 1993, the tribunal has accepted only one in eight applications for asylum.

The tribunal announced on October 21 that it would reduce the time taken to rule on priority cases from 64 to 46 days. Other cases may still take up to 70 days, occasionally longer. For refugees who have arrived illegally, this is spent in mandatory detention.

A resolution passed in the Senate on October 30 called on the government to respond to the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruling in April which stated that Australia was violating the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights by compulsorily detaining asylum seekers. The resolution also requested that "the government formulate policy alternatives to mandatory detention" and "respond within 60 days on how the mandatory detention policy can be amended to meet international human rights standards".

From GLW issue 297