SYDNEY (AFP) – Australia vowed Saturday to work closely with the United Nations to ensure unaccompanied asylum seeker children sent to Malaysia were protected after the world body withdrew support for the scheme.
The UN's refugee agency UNHCR criticised Canberra's plan to send 800 boatpeople to Malaysia after it emerged that the group would include lone children, saying it breached safeguards required for vulnerable groups.
The plan, under which Australia will accept 4,000 registered refugees from the Southeast Asian nation, has drawn heavy criticism from human rights advocates including Amnesty International and the UN Children's Fund, UNICEF.
Activists argue that Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention and say asylum seekers could be mistreated there.
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said the government would work closely with the UN to ensure processes were in place to protect the children, some of whom were girls as young as 12, but vowed to push ahead with the controversial plan.
"(The UNHCR) indicate that they want to see protections in place for vulnerable unaccompanied minors, and I agree with them," Bowen told reporters.
"They also say that it shouldn?t be difficult and would not be difficult to incorporate those, and I agree with them."
"We?ve been in close consultation and discussions with them and we?ll continue to do that. We?re all on the same page," he added.
Bowen said the "operational detail" about how to best protect individuals -- to be decided on a "case by case basis" -- was yet to be ironed out, but anyone considered vulnerable would be afforded "particular care" under the plan.
"We will consider, in those cases, if it is appropriate to transfer those people to Malaysia or to make other arrangements, and if they are transferred to Malaysia, what care and support needs to be put in place," he said.
"We?re in discussions with other countries around the region as well, and there would be options as to how to deal with these issues."
Bowen urged against a blanket rule excluding unaccompanied minors from the swap.
"It sends a message to people smugglers and asylum seekers that the way to get re-settlement to Australia is to send children who would then be accepted and then allow those children to sponsor the rest of the family," Bowen said.
The 18,000 refugee children currently living in Malaysia would be "heavily represented" in the 4,000 accepted by Australia, he added.
UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said in Geneva Friday that the agency was "not able to lend our support to the text as it currently stands because of the absence of the operating protection safeguards we have been calling for".
"UNHCR has always stipulated that one of our specific requirements with regard to the transfers is that protection safeguards are in place to protect vulnerable groups, especially unaccompanied children," he added.
Refugees are a sensitive issue in Australia, where a record 6,900 illegal immigrants arrived by boat in 2010, mostly on rickety vessels from Indonesia and usually hailing from strife-torn Iraq, Afghanistan or Sri Lanka.
Canberra's plan to ship arrivals to Malaysia has been likened by some commentators to the previous government's "Pacific Solution" -- under which boatpeople were held on remote Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus island.
Branded "inhumane" by human rights groups, the harsh policy was repealed by Prime Minister Julia Gillard's centre-left Labor Party in 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment