On 2 August 2009, the Centre made a Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee on the Migration Amendment (Immigration Reform) Bill 2009.
The Bill is intended to ’implement the Government’s New Directions in Detention policy to increase clarity, fairness and consistency in the way the Minister and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship respond to unlawful non-citizens’.
The Submission analyses the extent to which the amendments introduced by the Bill implement the Government’s New Directions in Detention Policy and comply with Australia’s obligations under international human rights law.
While welcoming aspects of the Bill, the Submission considers and makes recommendations regarding a number of deficiencies, including that the Bill:
- maintains the policy of mandatory immigration detention, contrary to international human rights law which requires adequate and individualised justification for detention in each case;
- while enshrining some important new ‘principles’, at the same time introduces substantive new operational provisions that fundamentally contradict those principles;
- does not prevent the detention of children in all closed detention facilities;
- does not apply in exclusion zones, most notably on Christmas Island, and therefore denies to all asylum seekers on Christmas Island any improvements introduced by the Bill;
- does not impose a time limit on immigration detention or require authorised officers to consider granting temporary community access permissions, and therefore detention can continue to be for long periods of time in circumstances where detention is unnecessary; and
- does not provide that decisions to detain should be subject to independent judicial review, as required by international human rights law.
