Executive Summary
The year 2015 was a dramatic and traumatic period for refugees, in Australia and internationally. The number of people forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence and human rights violations is now at the highest level since World War II.1 The enormous challenges of global displacement have come to be symbolised by dramatic images of Syrian children washing up dead on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, Germans lining up to help refugees at train stations and Hungary’s barbed wire fence along its border.
In Australia, those images were mixed with alarming stories of the harm suffered by the people detained in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Less visibly, the year 2015 was marked by the implementation of dramatic changes in Australia’s asylum policy, affecting over 30,000 people in the Australian community. These included significant changes to the determination of refugee status, the introduction of Temporary Protection Visas and the removal of government-funded legal assistance.
New issues emerged, including protracted delays in the granting of citizenship and the denial of access to further or higher education for those on Temporary Protection Visas. Most of the old problems remained, including the vanishing prospects for many refugees of being reunited with their loved ones, access to education and employment, and the absence of suitable housing options.
This submission to the Australian Government on options for the 2016-17 Refugee and Humanitarian Program and for broader refugee policy reflects the voices and views, and the ideas and expertise, of individuals and organisations from across Australia: people from refugee backgrounds, people seeking asylum and the many brave and committed communities and organisations supporting them. It is the result of the largest consultation process ever conducted by RCOA in 30 years of preparing annual submissions, based on 50 face-to-face consultations in 17 cities and towns in eight states and territories, as well as additional meetings and teleconferences and a call for submissions. The submission also brings international perspectives, through gathered by RCOA from international networks, participation in global meetings and from refugee communities in Australia. While outlining current and future challenges for Australian refugee policy, our goal has been to draw together a constructive agenda of new ideas as well as incremental improvements to existing programs.
International Refugee Needs
The number of people forcibly displaced is now higher than at any point in the past seven decades. Almost 60 million people were displaced as at 31 December 2014, a number that has increased significantly in 2015. Unprecedented shortfalls in funding mean that humanitarian agencies “are no longer able to meet even the absolute minimum requirements of core protection and lifesaving assistance to preserve the human dignity of the people [they] care for.”
For the first time, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has projected that, for the first time, more than 1 million people will need resettlement, less than 1% of refugees are resettled. Given the remote chances of resettlement, people are increasingly forced to take dangerous journeys due to deteriorating conditions and the failure of states to protect.
While much international attention in 2015 focused on the tragic consequences of Syria’s civil war and its impacts across the Middle East and Europe, displacement in Africa continued to grow at an alarming rate. People continued to flee conflicts in Burundi, South Sudan, Central African Republic and Nigeria, while the conflict in Yemen displaced people into the Horn of Africa as well as Saudi Arabia and Oman.
This escalation of global displacement has been met with a mixed response. Countries like Turkey have kept their borders open despite already hosting over 2.7 million registered refugees. Many ordinary people have responded in a spirit of Willkommenskultur, such as those fishing people out of the sea in Greece and Indonesia, the Germans lining up to help at train stations, and those in Jordan inviting refugees into their homes. Additional pledges to resettle Syrians increased significantly, including through the pressure of public sentiment in Australia.
On the other hand, many governments are increasingly adopting punitive deterrent measures and seeking to shift responsibility for refugee protection to other countries, both fuelling and fuelled by rising xenophobic sentiment. Examples abound: Hungary’s construction of a barbed wire fence along its border with Serbia; the abandonment of Rohingya persons at sea; and the reaction of some American politicians to the resettlement of Syrian refugees.
In our consultations, we heard a wide range of concerns about situations of persecution and conditions in countries hosting refugees. Participants also identified particular countries, regions, ethnicities and religions as possible priorities for Australia’s resettlement program.
Since 2011, the Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) has advocated a set of principles to be used in planning the Refugee and Humanitarian Program. These principles include: making resettlement widely available as a durable solution; focusing on resettling vulnerable people; emphasising family unity; using resettlement strategically to promote broader refugee protection while balancing resettlement needs in different regions; and including an additional response for large-scale emergency situations such as the situation in Syria. Our calls for a larger resettlement program and an emergency component have been broadly supported in our consultations and by the generous public response of offers of help for Syrian refugees in 2015.
Most importantly, the last principle we have suggested is the need for a coherent overarching government strategy for refugee protection, extending beyond refugee resettlement to aid and development, involvement in multilateral forums and diplomatic action. These and other strategies (such as exploring alternative paths to admission) were discussed at an international level during the 2015 UN High Commissioner’s Dialogue on Protection Challenges, which focused on the need to address the root causes of displacement and to move from crisis management to crisis resolution and prevention.
Some possible strategies would be to: invest in prevention and early intervention; use Australia’s aid and development program to support host states with large displaced communities, fund peacebuilding and rehabilitation programs and increase humanitarian aid for displaced communities; and use our diplomatic relations to increase pressure to improve refugee protection.