Category Archives: Community Scholar

Canada’s culture of mean: Beating up on refugees

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Matthew Behrens

| May 21, 2013

Photo: GRC-RCMP/ Frontière-Border/flickr

Toronto’s legendary refugee rights lawyer Barb Jackman has a unique way of framing issues at their most human level, an art often lost by those who spend their lives in courts and immigration tribunals fighting for their clients’ right not to be deported to torture and other cruelties. Testifying recently before a Senate committee on a repressive piece of deportation legislation, Jackman aptly summed up the mean political culture that increasingly grips the land.

Bill C-43 (a.k.a., most inappropriately, the Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act) could be called the double punishment bill, because that’s essentially what it does: individuals without full citizenship status in Canada not only face a sentence if criminally convicted, but automatic deportation following that, without ministerial discretion to examine the context of the conviction and the severe consequences of forced removal on individuals, families and communities.

“Taking away humanitarian discretion, which we have never not had, is a fundamental change in the way we look at non-citizens,” Jackman told the Senate. “I believe there should have been a national debate about whether or not we want to go there in terms of being a mean, petty, disgusting country.”

C-43 removes from a whole class of people access to the immigration appeal division and, in a masterstroke of fundamental unfairness, also applies retroactively to permanent residents who’ve served sentences of over six months that predate the new legislation. Hence, someone who has a criminal conviction from 15 years ago may now be uprooted from their family and deported without access to any kind of appeal. Pre-C-43, if the sentence was 2 years less a day, one could appeal for discretionary relief from a deportation order. But if the sentence was 2 years or over, even by a day, that appeal disappeared. Under C-43, the benchmark is reduced to a six-month sentence, and applies retroactively to someone who, when they negotiated a sentence, thought they would have access to an appeal if facing deportation.

The issue was explored in the Supreme Court’s Pham decision earlier this year, in which an individual who seems to have been caught up in circumstances beyond his control was sentenced to two years behind bars, removing the possibility that he could appeal to the Minister to consider the context of his case and humanitarian reasons for allowing him to stay. The Supreme Court reduced his sentence by one day so that Pham could have access to a deportation appeal; C-43 removes that possibility.

Destroying lives under C-43

The Canadian Bar Association’s Gordon Maynard provided numerous examples to Senators of folks whose lives will be destroyed under the new legislation. For example, “a permanent resident in Canada since 11 years of age, here for 20 years, with parents here and siblings, married with children but suffering from alcoholism and mental illness, loses his employment, falls into substance abuse and engages in petty frauds and credit card thefts. He is convicted of his first criminal offences in Alberta; he is given a six-month sentence. By Bill C-43, there is no review of his circumstances upon issuance of a deportation order. His time in Canada, his illnesses, his family and his lack of any prior record will not be considered. There is no appeal to the appeal division.”

A Canadian citizen facing the same circumstances would only be punished once and, perhaps, be directed towards help for mental illness and addiction issues. Not so for the permanent resident or refugee. Maynard posed another possibility, whereby a  “Mr. Singh, a permanent resident in Canada, is vacationing in Hawaii. While socializing in a bar, there is a racial insult, an argument and a fight. He punches someone in the nose; it is a good punch. He is arrested and appears before a judge the next day. Mr. Singh does not want to spend his time in Hawaii fighting a charge that he does not believe he is guilty of, but he pleads guilty to go home. He pleads guilty to assault causing bodily harm and pays a $200 fine. He is released and allowed to return to Canada…. It is a conviction outside of Canada for an offence in Canada that is classified as serious. It does not matter what penalty he got. Under Bill C-43, when he is issued a deportation order, there is no review in the appeal division.”

Criminal lawyers point out that the new legislation will likely cram the already overcrowded prison systems with permanent residents who are fearful that taking a conditional sentence in the community will harm their chances of staying in Canada. Indeed, conditional sentences for minor offences tend to be longer than those behind bars, but if a conditional sentence is over six months, that is a ticket to deportation; a four-month jail term may be sought instead, increasing the cost of punishment and also blocking the individual from community programs.

Who does this legislation most affect? Not ‘foreign’ criminals

While Immigration Minister Jason Kenney crows from atop his deportation perch that this legislation is necessary, those most affected are not “foreign” criminals but rather long-time residents who have made mistakes but, because of their status in Canada, face far greater consequences than those born here, with no right of appeal. They are not alone. The legislation stretches into the Twilight Zone by nailing individuals who are only suspected of having committed an offence outside of Canada — no actual proof of conviction required — with no chance to review the CBSA officer’s decision.

In a shout-out to CSIS, Canada’s scandal-ridden spy agency, C-43 also requires that individuals applying for citizenship attend a mandatory interrogation, in which they must answer all questions “for the purposes of an investigation,” a significant change from the current requirement, which limits the need of the interviewee to answer questions to those that are “reasonably required.” Canadian citizens can refuse to answer questions from CSIS; but refugees and permanent residents are losing any wiggle room, exposing them to a grilling that, should they fail to co-operate in a broad-ranging questioning that may have nothing to do with their application (a common enough practice as it is), will result in a failure to pass security screening.

In yet another example of officially legalizing what has been a standard practice of Mr. Kenney’s (such as in the high-profile case rejecting entry of British MP George Galloway), the Minister under C-43 can deny entry to Canada to anyone for a period of three years based on undefined “public policy grounds.” The Canadian Bar Association condemns this as an unprecedented Ministerial power that “invites arbitrary application and abuse. It is repugnant to the fundamental principles of Canadian democracy and the freedoms protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The lack of accountability and the vague criteria would allow Ministers who may so choose, to deny entry to persons whose views are unpopular or simply objectionable to the government of the day.”

Televising Canada’s culture of meanness

While the new law — which passed the Senate committee last week without amendment and is up for third reading later this month — will likely be the subject of litigation, another exercise of this government’s culture of meanness ran into rough waters earlier this year when a grassroots campaign was brilliantly organized to end the exploitation of some very vulnerable souls.

Readers may recall the high-profile arrest of a group of B.C. workers that was filmed by the reality TV program Border Security, a Force Four “entertainment” enterprise airing on National Geographic TV. While in detention, the arrestees had waivers placed in front of them, demanding they sign away their right to privacy so the show could air their arrests, interrogations and deportations.

Based on a highly rated Australian show that, according to unclassified memos sent to the Canadian Border services Agency (CBSA) minister, “reinforces main compliance messages,” Border Security was recommended as a good investment for the federal government, especially since the U.S. Customs and Border Protection also pursues “a robust program to engage the film and television industry.” That’s how the CBSA became a television producer.

Like the 1976 satire on news media, Network, whose corporate executives hire armed groups to film themselves while engaging in bank robberies and other headline-grabbing events in order to boost ratings, Border Security has a built-in incentive to produce dramatic events that will draw viewers. Indeed, the CBSA calls itself “de facto executive production authorities and, as such, would identify scenarios, sites and storylines, as well as provide active engagement in, as well as oversight and control of, all film shoots.”

CBSA’s history of using migrants as fodder for attention

This is not the first time CBSA has used migrants as fodder for attention. Its notorious “Wanted by the CBSA” website maligned dozens of individuals by posting their pictures and describing them as war criminals, among other disparaging terms. Follow-up to that campaign resulted in a September 11, 2012 CBSA memo from agency vice-president Pierre Sabourin, who advised that his website would “feature a minimum of 35 individuals who will be continuously refreshed and updated with cases from the CBSA immigration warrant inventory.”

Notably missing in that memo was the human element of wrongly named individuals whose privacy is obliterated, and whose safety is put in serious jeopardy if they are in fact arrested and deported with the “national security” label strapped across their CBSA mug shot. No, they are merely part of the CBSA’s collateral damage inventory, people whose lives have no meaning other than as tools for carrying out their propaganda campaign either on websites or TV programs.

Like CBC or NBC executives considering their fall lineup of comedies and police dramas, the CBSA was faced with a conundrum, concluding there just aren’t enough alleged threats out there to keep the most-wanted program continually refreshed. As a result, “a proposal for the expansion” of the program’s criteria was said to be forthcoming. Shortly afterward, CBSA decided to both expand the criteria for inclusion on the Most Wanted list while dropping the inventory from 35 to 20. The briefing note does acknowledge, in one of those bureaucratic sops to that archaic notion of presuming innocence, that including the wider net of cases on the website may “be perceived negatively by the public as these individuals have not yet been determined to be inadmissible to Canada.”

The solution to this lack of inventory likely feeds into Border Security, where CBSA control of storylines could contribute to a greater public involvement in the Most Wanted program, noting, “Communications is exploring additional avenues to generate additional public interest and exposure to the ‘Wanted by the CBSA’ program, including pro-active media releases.”

While the CBSA’s most-wanted program is facing lawsuits and privacy complaints (forcing the agency to perhaps reconsider the use of such inflammatory labels as war criminal), its biggest concession to public pressure was the response to the Deportation is Not Entertainment campaign, which rallied thousands to decry the abuse of migrants for entertainment purposes. The agency will not air footage from the original immigration enforcement raid (though numerous of the detainees have since been deported), and CBSA seems slightly humbled. But the offensive program remains on the air, and efforts to derail it continue.

Meantime, it is never too late for Canadians to ask themselves just how mean, petty, and disgusting they are prepared to let things get. There are plenty of opportunities to get involved in grassroots efforts to reverse the tide.

Matthew Behrens is a freelance writer and social justice advocate who co-ordinates the Homes not Bombs non-violent direct action network. He has worked closely with the targets of Canadian and U.S. ‘national security’ profiling for many years.

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Another Flat-Earth Argument About Immigration’s Economic Drain

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Photo: Erin Zipper

The stodgy conservatives over at the Heritage Foundation released a long-expected report today that blasts immigration reform as an economic drain. The report, which is expected to be influential among conservative legislators, comes as the Senate Judiciary Committee begins work on its massive reform bill this week. A similar Heritage report is credited with helping to derail a previous reform effort, in 2006.

The paper is authored by Robert Rector, who came to fame as a key conservative thinker during the 1996 dismantling of family welfare, and his colleague Jason Richwine. The two claim that the “net increased fiscal costs generated by amnesty”—by which they mean the 13-year path to citizenship in the Senate bill—will cost $6.3 trillion in benefits and services for legalized immigrants over the next 50 years.

Put simply, the Heritage Foundation’s report is misleading. It focuses only on what the government spends in services and programs, minus what immigrants pay in taxes, while ignoring the vast economic contributions of immigrant communities. Nearly every independent analysis shows that immigration and immigration reform bring net economic growth. Rather than acknowledge this reality, the Heritage report reinforces a familiar trope about people of color as “takers,” a cultural rather than economic argument that conservatives have consistently invoked when trying to cut safety net programs.

A Flawed Analysis

There are lots of problems with the report. But quickly, here’s their claim. Because most newly legalized immigrants are low-income, legalization will cost the government $6.3 trillion more in benefits and services than newly legalized immigrants will pay in taxes over the next five decades. The bulk of that spending, they say, is on public education, the safety net, social security and health care. They’re most concerned with paying for school for kids and social security for aging immigrants.

Without digging into whether those calculations are right on their face, the report misses most of the story about immigrants’ relationship to the economy. As with anyone, immigrant communities’ economic impact is more than just how much any given family receives in benefits minus how much we pay in taxes. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office plans to use a so-called dynamic scoring method when it analyzes the immigration bill.

As the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews writes:

They also assume [immigration reform has] no other economic impact of any kind. That’s so implausible that even the CBO, which is famously conservative with regards to incorporating economic effects of policies, took direct economic effects of adding people to the workforce into account when evaluating the 2006-7 reform bill. They found that legalization, even paired with increased border security spending, would mildly cut the deficit over 10 years, by about $12 billion.

The CBO plans a similar analysis this year.

Even some on the right side of the GOP challenge the Heritage methodology. Sen. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., said in a statement, “The Congressional Budget Office has found that fixing our broken immigration system could help our economy grow. A proper accounting of immigration reform should take into account these dynamic effects.”

Missing The Point

The Heritage report accurately notes that CBO analyses look only 10 years into the future, which means it won’t account for additional benefits that that these immigrants will be eligible for if they become citizens. Immigrants on the 10-year provisional path to citizenship will be denied access to all government programs, including Obamacare healthcare exchanges. But existing research on immigration suggests that legalization provides a boon to the economy in the long term by increasing immigrants’ economic prospects in the future.

Take this research from the Immigration Policy Center on the 1986 immigration reform legislation. Rector and Richwine claim that immigrants are a drain because in aggregate those who are given legal status will remain poor and uneducated. But the IPC analysis finds precisely the opposite to be true. In the years after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act:

the educational attainment of IRCA immigrants increased substantially, their poverty rates fell dramatically, and their home ownership rates improved tremendously. Moreover, their real wages rose, many of them moved into managerial positions, and the vast majority did not depend upon public assistance.

And immigrants tend to stimulate the economy by starting businesses. Here’s what the Brookings Institutehas to say:

immigrants are 30 percent more likely to form new businesses than U.S.-born citizens…Such investments in new businesses and in research may provide spillover benefits to U.S.-born workers by enhancing job creation and by increasing innovation among their U.S.-born peers.

The same is true for of immigrants who don’t have lots of education, especially at the local level where immigration has for years been “revitalizing small-town America once plagued with a shrinking tax base and dim prospects for economic growth,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Here’s another problem with the report. The research lists public education as the most costly part of government spending on immigrant families—$13,000 of the annual $24,000 the authors say taxpayers spend on a family. That’s an absurd thing to be upset about. Education for all Americans is expensive, but it’s an investment in our collective future. Moreover, the majority of the kids in question were born here in the United States. They’re not immigrants at all, according to our Constitution.

If you want to read a filing cabinet full of studies on the positive economic impact of immigration reform, check out this Immigration Policy Center fact sheet.

But facts aren’t the point of the Heritage study. The point is to provide an escape hatch for Republicans who oppose the broadly popular legislation. Yesterday, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., told the NY Times he hoped to hold the bill up in committee long enough for it to die. “The longer this legislation is available for public review, the worse it’s going to be perceived,” he said Monday. “The longer it lays out there, the worse it’s going to smell.” As Senators propose amendments this week, don’t be surprised to see lawmakers, including those who oppose reform outright, citing the Heritage Foundation in an effort to stench up the room.

From colorlines

Quelling xenophobia in South Africa’s townships

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Abdullahi Wehliye’s shop in Philippi has been robbed seven times since 2010

PHILIPPI, 14 May 2013 (IRIN) – This week marks five years since tensions between foreigners and South Africans living in impoverished communities across the country erupted in xenophobic violence, leaving more than 60 people dead and tens of thousands displaced, their homes and businesses robbed and abandoned. 

Since May 2008, various initiatives have been established to detect early warning signs of future xenophobic attacks and to improve responses. But while no further outbreaks have occurred on the scale of the violence five years ago, attacks on foreign nationals have continued. On average, one person was killed every week in 2011, according to the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA).

The looting and victimization of foreigners has also remained a feature of the frequent service delivery protests that have rocked South African townships in recent years, as has the near impunity of perpetrators.

In a statement released on 13 May, CoRMSA concluded that “much more still needs to be done to promote peaceful communities”.

Tensions high

Philippi Township, 25km southeast of Cape Town, has been a hotspot for xenophobic violence in Western Cape Province post-2008. In an area where nearly 60 percent of residents are unemployed, according to census data, Ward Counsellor Thobile Gqola, estimated that foreign nationals run more than half of businesses.

“Generally, people are happy to live side-by-side; the problem starts when it comes to business,” he told IRIN.

Most of the violence has been directed at Somali refugees who run many of the small grocery stores known as ‘spaza’ shops in the township. Like many other Somali traders in Philippi, Abdullahi Wehliye, 28, opened a shop there after losing his shop in neighbouring Khayelitsha Township during the 2008 xenophobic violence.

“I lost everything; I had to start over,” he told IRIN as he served customers through a metal grill, a security precaution that has done little to protect him from crime.

Wehliye said his shop had been robbed seven times since it opened in 2010. During one incident in 2012, his brother was shot and killed. Although he reported all of the robberies, no arrests have been made. Of 60 Somali shopkeepers in the area, who have formed an association that Wehliye chairs, all have had their shops robbed and the vast majority have experienced shootings, Wehliye said.

A 2012 study by Vanya Gastrow and Roni Amit, of the African Centre for Migration and Society at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, found that Somali-run shops suffered disproportionately from crime, including attacks orchestrated by competing South African traders. Their vulnerability to such attacks was found to be partly the result of their lack of access to informal justice mechanisms and community structures.

In township settings, noted the researchers, leaders of local street committees, most of which fall under the authority of the South African National Civic Association (SANCO), often play a more important role in responding to crime than the formal justice system.

“People in townships still respect their ‘chiefs’,” said Charles Mutabazi, director of the Agency for Refugee Education, Skills, Training and Advocacy (ARESTA), a Cape Town-based NGO.

Peace monitoring, community building

ARESTA partnered with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to start a project in Philippi in 2012 that identified 20 community leaders in each of the townships’ five wards and trained them to be “peace monitors”. The three-day training included mediation and conflict-resolution skills as well as information about the rights of migrants and refugees.

“There’s a lot of conflict here,” said Vra Mdledle, a SANCO member and secretary to a ward counsellor who went through the training last year. “When you’re in SANCO, they don’t give you training, they just nominate you. ARESTA gave us skills we could use in our communities.”

She gave the example of a Somali shopkeeper in her area who had recently experienced an arson attack. Following a similar attack last year, he alleged that local police had pressured him to drop the case.

“I called all the peace monitors, and we decided to accompany him to the police station,” said Mdledle. “We asked to see the station commissioner and demanded that the previous case be reopened. I saw the police are not really doing their job.”

Although the focus of the project is to promote diversity and quell xenophobic tensions, the peace monitors do not limit themselves to advocating for foreign nationals. Locals also suffer as a result of police negligence, said Mdledle, and there are many situations that demand conflict-resolution skills in this densely populated township.

Voyiseka Nzuzo, 24, who went through the ARESTA training in February, said peace monitors in her area had recently intervened after the family of a nine-year-old rape victim beat and stabbed a man they believed to be the perpetrator. “We found that the child had pointed out five different people. We went to the police station and tried to convince the case investigator they had the wrong suspect,” she told IRIN.

Peace monitor, Lufefe Mdunyelwa in his barber shop

As the owner of a barber shop with foreign customers and the founder of a local business association that includes South Africans and migrants, Lefefe Mdunyelwa said he already had friends from other countries before he became a peace monitor, but that he still learned a lot from the training. “I learned that each and every person is just living for themselves; nobody’s trying to steal your business,” he told IRIN.

Noticing that the foreign members of his association were often discriminated against when it came to the issuing of business permits and the charging of rent by municipal officials, he said his association is now advocating for equal treatment.

Although ARESTA has made efforts to include members of Philippi’s Somali community in the peace monitor training and quarterly peace marches, Mutabazi said participation had been disappointing.

Wehliye, who is one of eight Somalis to have gone through the training, said language remained a barrier, and Gqola, the ward councillor, said foreign nationals often stayed away from meetings aimed at facilitating dialogue between local and foreign business owners because they felt intimidated.

Wehliye said he signed up for the training because “after we’d been robbed so many times, I wanted to know what rights I had. I learned I had the same rights [to justice] as local people. I feel empowered.”

Becoming a peace monitor has also brought him into contact with local leaders whom he works with to resolve conflicts. “I now feel like a member of the community,” he told IRIN.

Mutabazi said the success of the peace monitor project lay in its emphasis on changing the mindset of influential community leaders. Whether it will be rolled out in other townships will depend on funding, but Mutabazi is convinced that the value of the training has been tested.

“It’s empowering [participants] to be better community leaders. If we’re leaving that kind of legacy behind, it’s very good for promoting social cohesion.”

From IRIN

Margaret Cho, Alice Walker and 100 More Artists Call for Humane Immigration Reform

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From colorlines

by Julianne Hing, Wednesday, May 8 2013, 1:05 PM EST

Artwork by Ray Hernandez

On Tuesday more than 100 artists, comedians, writers and musicians issued a statement calling on Congress and President Obama to pass humane, inclusive and just immigration reform.

The signers, whose statement is available at MigrationIsBeautiful.com, say immigration reform must include five basics:

End the detentions and deportations that cause separation and suffering for families; Preserve families by expediting the visa process and retaining longstanding policies that reunite and stabilize families; Ensure all immigrants have basic workers’ rights; Provide equal immigration rights to LGBTQ individuals and families; and Create a clear roadmap to citizenship that includes all 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Because, they contend, “Migration is natural and beautiful. The human truth is that all people move, and all people have rights. Creating a just and humane immigration process is a moral and cultural imperative that secures the future of a vibrant nation.” Their calls come just as the Senate is taking up its immigration bill.

Take a look at the list of supporters in full; it’s a who’s who of smart artists. Novelists Ha Jin and Teju Cole support humane immigration policy. As do filmmakers Mira Nair and Robert Redford, along with comedians Negin Farsad and Margaret Cho, and actors Rosario Dawson, Blythe Danner and Alfre Woodard. Who wouldn’t want to be in such good company?

To kick off the campaign, which is a collaboration between The Culture Group, Air Traffic Control, and CultureStrike, artists Favianna Rodriguez, Ray Hernandez, Julio Salgado and Jason Carne created images with the campaign’s signature butterfly attached to it. Check out their work below:

by Favianna Rodriguez

by Jason Carne

by Julio Salgado

by Ray Hernandez

No Human Being is lIlegal: Its time to drop the ‘i-word’ More on Drop the I-Word Campaign on Al Jazeera

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To universally refer to people who live in the country without authorisation as “illegal immigrants” is incorrect [AP]
Language has been in the news lately.Last Tuesday, on April 2, the Associated Press announced it would no longer use “illegal immigrant” to refer to people living in a country without permission.The previous week, Alaska Republican Congressman Don Young referred workers in his father’s farm as “wetbacks“, although he subsequently apologised for the racialised slander.Why is language so important? What are people so upset about?The word “wetback” is a reference to the fact that many people who cross into the United States without authorisation must cross the Rio Grande. Mexicans and non-Mexicans use the term colloquially. The US government referred to their 1954 mass repatriation campaigns along the southern border as “Operation Wetback”.In her research with Mexican immigrants, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz found that undocumented Mexicans use the Spanish equivalent (mojados) to describe themselves, even if they had not actually gotten their backs wet in the Rio Grande. Nevertheless, Gomberg-Munoz chooses not to use the word in her own writing, because many people find the word offensive.It should not be difficult to see why wetback is offensive. It makes light of a dangerous crossing: last year, at least 477 people died attempting to cross over from Mexico to the US. Aside from that, when you call someone a name like wetback, you are making one action they committed into a permanent aspect of who they are. This critique can also be applied to the “i-word”.

Living without permission 

People who live in the US without permission from the US government are commonly referred to as illegals, illegal immigrants, illegal aliens, undocumented immigrants, or unauthorised migrants. The term you select to describe them has consequences.

The first term “illegal” is grammatically incorrect – as it uses an adjective (illegal) as a noun. A person could have entered the country illegally, but that does not mean it is appropriate to call them an “illegal”.

The US government prefers to use the terms “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant”. However, the fact that the government had adopted a moniker does not mean that the word is accurate or unproblematic. The US government also uses terms such as “criminal alien” and “fugitive alien”, which are dehumanising and politically motivated.

To universally refer to people who live in the country without authorisation as “illegal immigrants” is incorrect. As David Leopold points out, people who are victims of human trafficking and in the US without authorisation merit protection, not prosecution.

The terms “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien” are problematic because they focus all of our attention on one aspect of a person – the fact that they do not have permission to remain in the country. This is problematic because having crossed the border without permission does not render a person necessarily an “illegal immigrant”.

You can cross the border without permission, and later obtain legalisation and even citizenship. Just as going over the speed limit once does not make you an “illegal driver”, nor does crossing the border once make you an “illegal immigrant” or an “illegal alien”. Furthermore, as Professor Otto Santa Ana of the University of California, Los Angeles, explains, the use of the adjective illegal implies criminality, and overstaying your visa or evading immigration inspectors is a civil offence.

The term “undocumented immigrant” is imprecise, as people may live in a country without legal permission, yet have plenty of documents – including birth certificates, passports and consular cards. For this reason, organisations such as the Migration Policy Institute prefer “unauthorised migrant”. Unlike “illegal immigrant”, “unauthorised migrant” does not have a criminalising tone. If you are driving without a licence, it would make more sense to call you an “unauthorised driver” than an “illegal driver”. And, we don’t call employers who employ unauthorised immigrants “illegal employers”.

The Associated Press made the decision to refer to people as living in the country illegally instead of asillegal immigrants because it is more accurate to refer to people’s behaviour than to label them because of their behaviour. The AP draws a parallel between this discussion about immigrants and “saying someone was ‘diagnosed with schizophrenia’ instead of schizophrenic”. By focusing on people’s behaviour instead of labelling them, we can avoid using people’s behaviour to define them.

Here are the new AP guidelines:

illegal immigration: Entering or residing in a country in violation of civil or criminal law. Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission. 

Changing our language

This decision by the AP to refer to actions as “illegal” and not people is crucial because it will help us avoid dehumanising language. One action a person committed – crossing the border without permission or overstaying his/her visa – should not define him/her. In reality, it does not. People who overstay their visa may be eligible for legalisation, and eventually citizenship. And, once they obtain legalisation, they are no longer living in the country without permission. They no longer have to live with the burden of illegality.

Changing our language allows us to see how our laws render people unauthorised migrants just as much as their actions do. It permits us to shift our focus from thinking of a person as an “illegal immigrant” and remembering that we are talking about a relationship between what they did – violate the terms of their visa, and the laws that shape which actions are authorised and which are not. Most importantly, it helps us to remember that we are talking about people.

It is a big step forward for the AP, and perhaps next the New York Times and other major news outlets, to stop using the “i-word”.

No human being is illegal. The term “illegal immigrant” simultaneously dehumanises and criminalises people who are denied the opportunity to obtain authorisation from the US government to live in the country they call home.

This debate over language drives home the point that all language is politicised. If you choose to continue to call people “illegal” or “illegal immigrant”, you make your position on the immigration debate clear. You also make it difficult to have a logical conversation about the problems associated with millions of people living with illegality.

In contrast, if you choose to frame the debate around people who live in the US without access to full citizenship, and who must deal daily with the burden of illegality, it allows us to have a conversation about how to move forward and fix the problem – which lies with the burden of illegality, not with the people who came to the US in search of a better life for themselves and their families.

Tanya Golash-Boza is an associate professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of Yo Soy Negro Blackness in Peru, Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions and Deportations in Post-9/11 America and Due Process Denied: Detentions and Deportations in the United States. She blogs here. 

Follow her on Twitter: @tanyagolashboza

#May1TO, May Day: Solidarity City! – Status for All!

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Join us in the streets for the 8th Annual May Day of Action!

NOI

5:30pm on Wednesday May 1st, 2013
March starts at Nathan Phillips Square

Mark the date, more information forthcoming.

Videos from previous year: http://bit.ly/MayDayTOVids
More info: www.toronto.nooneisillegal.org/MayDay

Organized by a coalition of organizations. To endorse and participate in the organizing, please email nooneisillegal@riseup.net.

Palestinian Refugees in Jordan and the Revocation of Citizenship

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Palestinian Refugees in Jordan and the Revocation of Citizenship: An Interview with Anis F. Kassim

Jan 28 2013
by Hazem Jamjoum

[Palestinian Refugees, 1948. Public Domain. From Wikimedia Commons.]
[Anis F. Kassim is an international law expert and practicing lawyer in Jordan. He was a member of the Palestinian legal defense team before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the 2004 landmark case on Israel’s separation wall, and that led to the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The following interview was originally published by BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in their quarterly magazine al-Majdal.]

Hazem Jamjoum: What legal status was afforded Palestinians who came under Jordanian control after the 1948 Nakba?

Anis Kassim: On 19 May 1948, the Jordanian army entered the area of central Palestine that the Zionist forces were unable to occupy, and began the process of legally incorporating central Palestine into the Jordanian Kingdom. As part of this process, on 20 December 1949, the Jordanian Council of Ministries amended the 1928 Citizenship Law such that all Palestinians who took refuge in Jordan, or who remained in the western areas controlled by Jordan at the time of the law’s entry into force, became full Jordanian citizens for all legal purposes. The law did not discriminate between Palestinian refugees displaced from the areas that Israel occupied in 1948 and those of the area that the Jordanian authorities renamed the “West Bank” in 1950.

On one hand, this citizenship was forced upon the Palestinians who did not really have much of a say in the matter. On the other, this was a welcome move because it saved those Palestinians the hardship of living without citizenship.

HJ: How was the process for the revocation of citizenship complex?

AK: First of all, I should note that the law itself has not been officially amended, so what I am about to describe is still what is officially in effect today. First of all, the Jordanian Constitution, adopted in 1952, states that citizenship is a matter to be regulated by a law, and the Jordanian Citizenship Law was indeed adopted in 1954, replacing that of 1928 and its amendment. According to this law, it is possible to revoke the citizenship of a Jordanian citizen who is in the civil service of a foreign authority or government. The citizen must be notified by the Jordanian government to leave that service and, if the citizen does not comply, the Council of Ministries is the body with the authority that is able to decide to revoke his citizenship. Even if the Council does decide to revoke the citizenship, this decision must then be ratified by the King, and even then, the citizen whose citizenship was revoked has the right to challenge the Council of Ministries’ decision in the Jordanian High Court, and it is this court’s decision that is binding and final. These procedures are being completely ignored when the citizenship of a Jordanian of Palestinian origin is revoked.

HJ: Did the status of Palestinians in Jordan change after the 1967 War with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank?

AK: No. their status remained as Jordanian citizens.

HJ: When did the differentiation between Palestinian citizens of Jordan begin?

AK: Today we can speak of five kinds of Palestinian citizens of Jordan. The first differentiation came in the early 1980s, when the Jordanian government was concerned that Israeli policies and practices aimed to squeeze out the Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied West Bank; to empty out the Palestinian territories to replace them with Jewish settlers. The Jordanian government then created the first real differentiation between its Palestinian citizens by issuing differentiated cards.

Those who lived habitually in the West Bank were issued green cards, while those who habitually lived in Jordan but had material and/or family connections in the West Bank were issued yellow cards. The sole purpose of these cards at the time was so that the Jordanian authorities at the King Hussein (Allenby) Bridge—the only crossing point between Jordan and the occupied West Bank—could monitor the movement of these card holders, enabling the Jordanian authorities to know how many Palestinian West Bankers had crossed into Jordan, and to ensure that they returned, essentially a kind of statistical device. Indeed, this was a wise policy in terms of countering the Zionist plans to continue the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The major turning point came with the Jordanian disengagement (fak al-irtibat) from the West Bank on 31 July 1988.

HJ: What was the disengagement?

AK: Since 1948, when central Palestine came under Jordanian control, the Jordanian government has claimed the West Bank as part of the kingdom. By 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had come to be recognized on an Arab and, to some extent, international level as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, but the Israelis and Americans were still refusing to recognize the PLO, let alone to officially communicate with it. Jordan’s King Hussein shrewdly took the decision to disengage from the West Bank as a message to the United States and Israel that if they were going to negotiate with anyone over the fate of Palestinians in the West Bank, it should be with the PLO. In the famous speech he delivered on 31 July 1988 [1] in which he declared the disengagement—and we have to remember that this was during the most intense period of the first Intifada— King Hussein stated that the purpose of the disengagement was to support the Palestinians’ struggle for self determination by relinquishing his claim to that territory.

HJ: How was the disengagement a “turning point” for Palestinians’ status as Jordanian citizens?

AK: When the disengagement was declared, the color of the cards (yellow and green), that had been used as a statistical device, became the criteria for determining the citizenship status of a citizen. The government issued instructions to the effect that those who habitually lived in the West Bank, that is green card holders, on 31 July 1988 were “Palestinian citizens,” while those who were living in Jordan or abroad were Jordanian. Put another way, over one-and-a-half million Palestinians went to bed on 31 July 1988 as Jordanian citizens, and woke up on 1 August 1988 as stateless persons.

HJ: You previously mentioned that we can speak of five kinds of Palestinian citizens of Jordan. What are the different kinds of status among Palestinians citizen of Jordan currently?

AK: The first category we can call hyphenated Palestinian-Jordanians. These are Palestinians who were in Jordan on the date of the disengagement with no material connection to the West Bank or Gaza Strip, or who were Jordanian citizenship holders abroad. These are regarded as Jordanians for all legal purposes.

The Palestinians in the second category are the green card holders whose citizenship was revoked by the government orders that I described earlier.

The Palestinians in the third category are the yellow card holders, who kept their citizenship after the disengagement, but many of whom have more recently faced the revocation of their Jordanian citizenship rights.

The fourth category is that of blue card holders. These are 1967 Palestinians refugees from the occupied Gaza Strip who are in Jordan and who were never given citizenship rights. They are in a very miserable position because, since they are not Jordanian, they cannot enjoy any of the benefits of citizenship in this country: they cannot access public schools or health services, they cannot get driving licenses, they cannot open bank accounts, or purchase land. They are mostly concentrated in the refugee camps in the Jerash area, specifically the one called “Gaza Refugee Camp,” which is generally known as the worst of the refugee camps in Jordan in terms of living conditions. To build a tiny house in the camp, they need to get several permits from several government departments. While they receive some modest support from UNRWA, any support that comes from the rest of the society has to be approved by Jordanian security authorities.

The fifth, and newest, of the categories is that of Jerusalem residents. These have always been a special case: the Israelis consider them permanent residents of Israel without any citizenship rights, while for Jordan they are citizens whose status was not affected by the disengagement. The problem now is that the Israelis, as part of their ongoing ethnic cleansing project, are revoking the residency rights of Palestinians in Jerusalem who cannot prove that their “center of life” is in that city, to use the terms of the Israeli High Court. The Jordanian government has yet to officially take a position on the Jordanian citizenship rights of these Jerusalemite Palestinian citizens of Jordan whose residency in Jerusalem has been revoked by Israel. This is now another emerging problem.

HJ: You mentioned that yellow card holders have been facing the revocation of their Jordanian citizenship in recent years. Can you expand on this?

AK: The main institution that handles this issue is the Follow-up and Inspection Department (al-mutaba’a wa al-taftish) of the Jordanian Ministry of Interior. To understand what’s happening you need to understand that the way Jordanian citizenship works since 1992 is that every citizen must have a “national number” (raqam watani). Anyone who does not have this number is not a citizen.

In recent years, the Follow-up and Inspection Department has been expanding on the scope of its authority in interpreting the 1988 government regulations dealing with the revocation of Palestinians’ Jordanian citizenship. We need to keep in mind also that these regulations were never made public, and that in fact no policy, let alone law, dealing with the revocation of Palestinians’ citizenship in Jordan has ever officially been made public. Originally, as I described, 31 July 1988 was treated as a cut-off date, if you were a green card holder in the West Bank, your citizenship was revoked, and otherwise you remained a citizen. The Department has since expanded to the revocation of citizenship from others under other pretexts.

For instance, many Palestinian citizens of Jordan were able to acquire Israeli-issued West Bank residency permits through such procedures as family reunification since 1967. Of course, part of Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies manifested as revocation of West Bank residency permits over the years under various pretexts. For example, at one point West Bank residency permit holders who were away from the West Bank for more than three years had their residency revoked by the Israelis. The Follow-up and Inspection Department of the Jordanian Interior Ministry has revoked national numbers (i.e. citizenship) from many Palestinians who had their West Bank residency permits revoked by the Israelis under the pretext that these people should have kept these residency permits, and that the Palestinian should go and get the Israelis to reissue them their West Bank residency permits.

Another example is that of PLO or Palestinian Authority (PA) employees. Even though a Jordanian citizen can work for any other government, many Palestinian citizens of Jordan who have taken jobs in PA institutions have been stripped of their national numbers. A more recent example is that of the Jordanian parliamentary elections [November 2010]. Many of the Palestinians who went to register as voters were sent to the Follow-up and Inspection Department, where they had their national numbers revoked.

Ultimately, however, it is difficult to discern a particular logic to the post-1988 revocations. In some cases, one person or group within the family has their citizenship revoked, while others in the same family remain citizens. With regards to employment in the PLO or PA, there are PA parliamentarians and ministers with Jordanian national numbers, while some Palestinian citizens of Jordan, for example, have had their citizenship revoked for working for a PA-owned company or civil institution. We can only say that so far it seems very arbitrary. I should also add that this wave of citizenship revocation means that yellow card holders live with the perpetual fear of any interaction with the government bureaucracy, since this could result in being sent to the Follow-up and Inspection Department and having their citizenship revoked.

HJ: Is there a way to know how many Palestinians have had their Jordanian citizenship revoked since 1988?

AK: No, these numbers are kept secret by the Jordanian Ministry of Interior and are not made public. There are various estimates, but these numbers vary. The most well-known of these is that of the Human Rights Watch report that stated that over 2700 Palestinians citizens of Jordan had their citizenship revoked between 2004 and 2008, but this number is based on a journalistic article in a Jordanian newspaper, and so, in addition to not giving information on the years before or after the period, are not to be taken as authoritative.

HJ: What is the effect of the revocation of citizenship on the people involved?

AK: They become like the blue-card holders from the Gaza Strip that I talked about before without the ability to access any government services, open bank accounts, etc. It should be mentioned though that there is a potentially very dangerous situation for Jordan; if this trend continues it will become a “ghetto state.” When you forfeit a Jordanian’s citizenship and keep him in Jordan because you don’t have the power to send him to Palestine—because the Israelis of course refuse—you will end up with over a million stateless Palestinians within your borders, and who have nowhere to go.

HJ: Earlier you described the Jordanian law of citizenship and the various levels of government and judiciary through which the revocation of citizenship must pass to become final. Can Palestinians who have had their Jordanian citizenship revoked make use of what you described as an advanced citizenship law to challenge the Follow-up and Inspection Department’s actions?

AK: As I described above, there is no question that the revocations of citizenship that the Jordanian authorities have carried out since 1988 contradict the written law and indeed the constitution. Under the law, the revocation of citizenship must follow the procedures I spoke about earlier, and are not the subject to such things as the color of your card or regulations. As it stands, however, a junior officer of the Follow-up and Inspection Department can decide the fate of a citizen’s citizenship rights. It is now a more simple matter to revoke a yellow card-carrying citizen from his citizenship than it is to revoke their driving license! With the revocation of a driving license, the citizen has the right to challenge the revocation in a court. The Inspection and Follow-up Department is indeed the only government department that is not subject to judicial review.

The government justifies this by stating that the revocation of citizenship by this Department is an “act of state.” There is one judge, Justice Farouq Kilani, who was president of the Jordanian High Court of Justice who did challenge the government’s position, and stated that citizenship is a matter regulated by law and not regulations, and that therefore the actions of the Department are null and void. As a result of his ruling—this was in 1998—the Minister of Justice demanded his resignation, and Kilani resigned. He subsequently gave two public lectures on the topic, and wrote a book called Independence of the Judiciary, an excellent treatise in which he describes in detail both his landmark ruling and his encounter with the Justice Minister. His ruling was very correct, constitutionally sound and legally unchallenged. The Jordanian judiciary has a long tradition of reviewing administrative decisions, including decisions involving citizenship. As it stands now, the situation in Jordan is very suffocating on this issue of citizenship revocation because there is no right to appeal since the government treats these decisions as “acts of state,” and it is practically impossible to take these issues to an international court.

It is also important to mention that there is no refugee law in Jordan. As such, once the citizenship is revoked, the Palestinian refugee is left with no political, civil, or economic rights.

HJ: Besides the position that citizenship revocation is an “act of state,” how does the Jordanian government justify stripping its Palestinian citizens of their citizenship rights and rendering them stateless?

AK: There have been several justifications or excuses given. Jordanian officials maintain, for example, that the revocations are designed to force Palestinians to stay in Palestine, to stop the Zionist leadership from implementing its ethnic cleansing project. This argument is usually framed within the paradigm of the “alternative homeland” project, the Israeli right-wing’s position that Palestinians have a homeland, and this homeland is Jordan. We do not debate the importance of these goals, and of full-fledged rejection of the “alternative homeland” project on all fronts. Mixing this in with the issue of Palestinian citizenship rights in Jordan is like mixing apples and pears. The “alternative homeland” is a national issue, and thus should not be treated solely at the Jordanian level, but through Jordanian-Palestinian-Arab coordination as an Arab summit item. Such a political issue should not and cannot be mixed with a human rights issue such as the rights of Palestinian citizens of Jordan. Moreover, the people who are fighting the “alternative homeland” project are the Palestinians themselves who have fought it with their own bodies in these decades of spilled Palestinian blood. Actually, if Jordanian officials are sincere about their political position, they should take more credible action against the Israelis to force them to leave the Palestinians in peace and to allow the refugees to return, as is their internationally recognized right.

Furthermore, as a sovereign state, the Jordanian government could have taken steps during the negotiation of the Wadi Araba Israeli-Jordanian peace settlement to insist on such things as allowing Jordanian citizens to maintain their West Bank residency permits, and to restore those that had been stripped. As it stands now, the Jordanian government does not have the power to push for such a residency permit to be issued to an individual, and so by stripping them of their Jordanian citizenship, these individuals are left stranded with nowhere to go. But also as it stands, the Jordanian government can stop security coordination with Israel, and can stop the marketing of Israeli products in Jordan. Lately, the Jordanian Ministry of Industry has allowed the entry of 2500 types of Israeli products into the Jordanian market.

Another justification that Jordanian officials forward is that they are not revoking citizenship, rather they are “correcting the situation” of certain individuals who were wrongly classified, that all they are doing is simply dropping the national number. “Correcting the situation” is the new catch-phrase you see. They say this to avoid contradiction of the Follow-up and Inspection Department’s actions with the law and constitution, but the fact remains that simply dropping the national number is in effect the total revocation of citizenship.

HJ: Do you see any way that this situation can be reversed?

AK: The January 2010 report of Human Rights Watch [2] about the citizenship revocation raised some awareness both locally, on an Arab level as well as internationally, but this was short-lived and has not alleviated the situation. This issue requires an international campaign of human rights organizations because there is no venue left to air your grievances. Ultimately, the situation would best be alleviated by addressing the root-cause of the situation of these Palestinians, which is the implementation of Palestinians’ right to return to the lands from which they were displaced. Until then however, more attention needs to be given to this thus far largely-ignored issue, and the Jordanian laws and constitution need to be respected and implemented by restoring the citizenship of those whose rights were revoked, and ensuring that the law is followed in any future case of citizenship revocation.

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[1] See the text of the speech at: http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/88_july31.html

[2] Human Rights Watch, “Stateless Again: Palestinian-Origin Jordanians Deprived of their Nationality,” Human, January 2010: http://www.hrw.org/node/87906

Council votes in favour of motion to help undocumented residents

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Chris Kitching, cp24.com,   Published Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013 11:04AM EST

City council has voted in favour of a motion that makes it easier for people without full and secure immigration status to access city services already available to legal residents of Canada.

According to advocates, the proposed measures within the motion make it easier for newcomers to receive aid from places such as food banks and access health, employment and recreation services, and ensure their children can attend local schools.

Syed Hussan, a spokesman for the Solidarity City Network, said there are about 400,000 people in Toronto who don’t have full immigration status.

City hall

Toronto City Hall is shown in this file photo. (The Canadian Press/Michelle Siu)

“These people live here, they’re part of our community,” Hussan told CP24 reporter Katie Simpson ahead of the vote. “They should be in our schools, they should be able to walk down the street to the food bank or a shopping centre or go into a shelter without fear of detention and deportation.”

Hussan, who was at city hall Thursday to watch council debate the motion, said that having the motion approved would help newcomers take one “small step” towards that goal.

He is also calling on the provincial and federal governments to eliminate restrictions.

The motion not only calls on improved access to city services, it also calls for the federal government to create a regularization program for undocumented residents, and asks the province to review its policies for provincially-funded services to ensure access to health care, emergency services, housing and other social supports.

“We need the province to join in, we need the federal government to make its moves and we need Toronto to set the path forward,” Hussan said.

Dozens of supporters, wearing yellow T-shirts reading “Access without fear,” attended the city council meeting to watch the vote.

By passing the motion, Toronto becomes the first city in Canada to have “sanctuary city” type policies, according to Solidarity City Network.

Read more: http://www.cp24.com/news/council-votes-in-favour-of-motion-to-help-undocumented-residents-1.1165807#ixzz2O5OI7lKb

Watch the Video Here:  Council votes in favour of motion to help undocumented residents | CP24.com.

Furore over Australian detention of immigrant children

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Close to 2,000 children are under some form of detention in Australia

 

“You cannot underestimate the human cost of detaining children,” Jeroen Van Hove, the coordinator of the  (IDC), an umbrella group of 258 members (including organizations) working in 50 countries around the world, based in Belgium, told IRIN, describing Australia’s detention regimes as one of the “harshest” in the world.MELBOURNE, 5 March 2013 (IRIN) – Australia is failing in its international obligations to protect the rights of close to 2,000 children now in immigration detention, say rights groups and legal experts.

“You cannot underestimate the human cost of detaining children,” Jeroen Van Hove, the coordinator of the  (IDC), an umbrella group of 258 members (including organizations) working in 50 countries around the world, based in Belgium, told IRIN, describing Australia’s detention regimes as one of the “harshest” in the world.MELBOURNE, 5 March 2013 (IRIN) – Australia is failing in its international obligations to protect the rights of close to 2,000 children now in immigration detention, say rights groups and legal experts.

“You cannot underestimate the human cost of detaining children,” Jeroen Van Hove, the coordinator of the International Detention Coalition (IDC), an umbrella group of 258 members (including organizations) working in 50 countries around the world, based in Belgium, told IRIN, describing Australia’s detention regimes as one of the “harshest” in the world.

“The current detention policy causes serious damage to these children and has been criticized internationally for its human rights violations.”

According to Australia’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship, as of 1 March there were 1,983 children (under 18) in immigration detention, including 998 in secure locked facilities and 985 detained in the community (the preferred option for children as it allows them to live in community-based accommodation without the need to be escorted outside a locked facility).

Of these, 281 are detained on Christmas Island (off the coast of Indonesia), while a further 34 are on remote Manus Island in Papua New Guinea (PNG) as part of the government’s controversial offshore processing efforts.

Activists there describe conditions as “overwhelmingly inadequate”.

This is a “blatant violation of international norms and arguably in breach of a range of UN Conventions,” Linda Briskman, a professor of human rights at Swinburne University, charged. “There is a mounting body of evidence, particularly from mental health professionals and researchers that reveals the terrible harms resulting from the detention of children.”

Mental health impact

Asylum advocacy groups in Australia have long raised concerns following reports of self-harm and trauma experienced by children in low-security facilities.

In February, an Australian-based organization, the Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network (DASSAN), received reports from the Immigration Department under Australia’s Freedom of Information Act detailing self-harm among children at two Darwin detention centres.

Outside a Darwin detention centre

“These reports explain there were 26 self-harm incidents in Darwin centres from August 2010 to November 2011. The youngest child was only nine years old and he took an overdose of Panadeine, knowing what the full effects on him would be,” DASSAN coordinator Fernanda Dahlstrom said.

This was despite the fact that the Darwin airport lodge is considered more humane than other processing centres, she added.

“These cases aren’t isolated. More children are suffering the same psychological side effects as a result of detention in other facilities. We just don’t officially know the numbers,” said Leila Druery, a spokeswoman for ChilOut, an advocacy group for children in immigration detention in Australia.

“We would like to see the issue of detaining children depoliticized, by giving an independent children’s commission an oversight and guardianship role,” Druery explained, in reference to the current conflict of interest where the immigration minister is the sole person who decides if his own department is acting in the best interests of the child.

The Australian Red Cross echoes these concerns on placing children in detention centres for unknown periods of time while their refugee status is processed.

“[The] Australian Red Cross believe community-based detention for asylum seekers is a humane and sustainable alternative to the use of secured detention facilities and arrangements,” the Red Cross said in a statement.

“Evidence shows that when people spend long periods in immigration detention facilities, not only does their health suffer, but also their ability to cope and their psychological well-being.”

Rights of the child

Legal experts in Australia point to the responsibilities the government has under its international obligations, including as a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

“Perhaps, the most obvious treaty breach is that of CRC. Clearly, maintaining children in detention for long periods of time does not treat their welfare as the paramount consideration,” said Stephen Keim, a Brisbane barrister and the president of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights.

Keim noted that when the periods of detention were long and indefinite so as to affect the mental health of the children involved, or the conditions are unsatisfactory, “issues of cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment arise,” which is prohibited under the Convention Against Torture, the CRC and the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights.

According to CRC, the detention of children should be used “only as a measure of last resort, for the shortest appropriate period of time and taking into account the best interests of the child.”

In February, a report by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child asked states to “expeditiously and completely cease the detention of children on the basis of their immigration status”.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has also expressed deep concern over the treatment of children in the Manus processing centre, which was reopened on 21 November 2012 in PNG.

“The mandatory detention of 34 children and their families at the Centre is particularly troubling for us,” said UNHCR regional representative Richard Towle.

The UNHCR report released on 4 February 2013 following a visit to the Manus Island facility noted that: “When viewed against the applicable international legal standards, it is clear that the current situation for detained children is profoundly unsatisfactory and UNHCR is therefore of the view that it is not currently appropriate for children to be transferred to Manus Island.”

Immigration remains a divisive issue in Australia

Duty of care

Refugee policy has long been a divisive issue in Australia, even though the country receives a small number of refugees annually compared to other countries including the USA, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden.

In 2011, Australia received 15,441 onshore asylum applications, just 0.92 percent of the 1,669,725 applications received across the world, the Refugee Council of Australia reported.

However, according to Australia’s current labour government, the government is committed to ensuring people held in immigration detention are treated with dignity and respect and that children are always accommodated in the least restrictive form of detention accommodation available.

“No-one wants to see children in detention for long periods, which is why children have priority processing and the department endeavours to process their claims quickly,” said Brendan O’Conner, Australia’s minister for immigration and citizenship, in a statement provided to IRIN.

“The Australian government has a duty of care to ensure the health and wellbeing of children in immigration detention – including ensuring access to appropriate physical and recreational activities and excursions and education,” added O’Conner.

At the same time, all irregular maritime arrivals have to be detained while their “identities, health and reasons for travel are ascertained”.

Meanwhile, the Greens, a minority party that currently holds the balance of power in the Australian Senate, are campaigning for policy change when it comes to placing children in detention.

“Some of these children have spent their whole lives behind bars, having committed no crime other than being born in a country from which they are forced to flee,” said Senator Hanson-Young, who visited the detention centre in Manus Island in February.

“The government needs to end this cruel regime of indefinite detention.”

Since January 2013, most of the 1,382 irregular maritime arrivals were asylum seekers arriving by boat from Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.