Savitri Taylor

The Myth of Transit: The Making of a Life by Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Indonesia

ABSTRACT An increasing number of migrants are living in a state of indefinite ‘transit’. In this paper, we report on interviews conducted in 2009 with 59 refugees and asylum seekers in Indonesia and describe how these individuals make a life despite their circumstances. While all participants were deeply affected by their position of uncertainty and insecurity, most sought to transcend these conditions and pursue significant life projects such as getting married, having children, becoming part of the local community, and working towards a better future. The current conceptualisation of transit as life in limbo does not wholly account for such permanent, life-changing experiences. We analyse the reasons why the use of the term ‘transit’ persists in international policy settings despite its incongruities, arguing that its ongoing political valence overrides its conceptual flaws.

The human rights implications of the psychosocial harm Caused by Australia's temporary protection regime.

This article argues that Australia’s temporary protection regime is flawed because it is not designed to ensure that the psychosocial harm that temporary status (and its accompanying disadvantages) inflicts on an individual will never be so great as to amount to ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ within the meaning of art 7 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Available for download at http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AJHR/2005/8.html

Should Unauthorised Arrivals in Australia Have Free Access to Advice and Assistance

This article argues that unauthorised arrivals in Australia have a need for access to independent and competent advice and assistance, which is not being met adequately at present. The article further argues that the consequences are two-fold. First, it is likely that some unauthorised arrivals are being removed from Australia in breach of Australias international protection obligations. Second, by making membership of community the basis on which procedural protection is accorded we are effectively rejecting the universal morality that underlies human rights treaties thereby endangering the substantive rights of every person subject to Australian law.

Escaping Accountability: A Case of Australia's Asylum Seeker Policy

Purpose - The paper addresses two questions. First, what contracts, instruments and accounting activities constitute Australia’s offshore asylum seeker processing policy in practice? Second, how are notions of legitimacy and accountability mediated through the network constituted by this policy? Design/methodology/approach - The paper is located in the critical interpretivist approach to accounting research. It is based on an exhaustive documentary analysis. Policy documents, contract documents, records of parliamentary inquiries (Hansard) and legislation were analysed drawing on a network policy perspective. Findings - The paper finds that the Australian Government has sought to escape its accountability obligations by employing a range of approaches. The first of these approaches is the construction of a network involving foreign states, private corporations and nongovernment organizations. The second is through a watered down accountability regime and refusal to be accountable for the day to day life of asylum seekers in offshore processing centres through a play with the meaning of “effective control”. Yet while the policy network seems designed to create accountability gaps, the requirement within the network to remain financially accountable undermines the governments claims not to be responsible for the conditions in the detention camps. Research limitations/implications - The paper focuses largely on the period starting from when Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister to the death in Papua New Guinea of asylum seeker Reza Barati on 17 February 2014. Earlier periods are beyond the scope of this paper. Practical implications - The paper will result in the identification of deficiencies in human rights accountability for extra-territorialized and privatised immigration detention and may contribute towards the formulation of effective policy recommendations to overcome such deficiencies. The paper also provides empirical data on, and academic understanding of, immigration detention outsourcing and offshoring. Originality/value - The article provides the first detailed and full understanding of the way Australia’s offshore asylum seeker processing policy is practiced. The paper also provides an empirical analysis of the way national policy and its associated accountability mechanisms emerge in response to the competing legitimacy claims of the international community and national electorate.

Using the Principle of Non-Discrimination to Reconcile the National Contract with the Global Compact.

The argument of this article is that the best way to reconcile the national social contract with the global compact is to ensure that the terms of the national social contract are compatible with the principle of non-discrimination. It suggests that if national societies were seriously guided by the principle of non-discrimination, the response to the rights claims of non-citizens would be a lot different from the present situation, without, in fact, requiring more of any of us than we, as ordinarily self-centred human beings, are capable of delivering.

Rethinking Australia's practice of ‘turning around’ unauthorised arrivals: The case for good faith implementation of Australia's protection obligations∗

Australia presently has a practice of ‘turning around’ most unauthorised arrivals without giving them an opportunity to apply for a protection visa. The practice reflects a deliberate choice on the part of the Australian government not to implement Australias international protection obligations in good faith. The choice is easily explicable in domestic political terms. However, it is not a rational choice for the nation in an era of globalisation. By contrast, a choice to implement Australias international protection obligations in good faith would be a choice to take responsibility for remaking the world into the sort of place in which we would all prefer to live: a world governed by an international rule of law founded on universal moral principles. This article argues that active moral agency is a choice worth making.

The International Governance of Forced Migration

Australia and other developed countries recognize that many irregular migrants are asylum seekers (i.e. individuals whose human security is under such thereat in their country of origin that they have no option but to seek in another country the protection that they cannot find at home). Nevertheless, they regard all irregular migration as a threat to national security (widely conceived) against which defence is required. This chapter analyses why irregular migration perceived as a problem in the first place and considers how the phenomenon can be dealt with in a way which promotes the betterment of sending societies, receiving societies and the irregular migrants themselves. In particular, it considers the possibility of a comprehensive solution to the problem of irregular migration which brings together consideration of asylum seeker, labour migration and development policy issues in a human security framing.

Migration and Human Security in the Asia–Pacific Region

On 11 September 2001, hijacked passenger planes were deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. These attacks caused the death of approximately 3000 people. The perpetrators of this terrorist attack were not citizens of the United States but rather foreign nationals who had entered the country on student and tourist visas. It is not surprising then, as Graeme Hugo points out in the interview with him published in this special section, that ‘the security considerations that arose after 9/11 . . . have led to much greater dialogue between countries with respect to movement across borders’. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that 9/11 merely exacerbated a tendency already apparent on the part of governments to treat those who move across international borders as a security problem. The tendency is, in fact, part of a wider postCold-War phenomenon of extending the meaning of security beyond the safeguarding of the state against military threats to its very existence, to one that encompasses the safeguarding of its society as a whole against perceived transnational threats to a way of life. If border crossers were considered a security problem primarily because they might be terrorists, all border crossers would be equally suspect and equally the target of control measures. Interestingly, however, the movement across borders of well-heeled tourists, business travellers and the like continues to be facilitated. It is would-be migrants, whether voluntary or forced, who are perceived and treated as the greater threats—perhaps criminals, or, worse still, potential takers of citizens’ jobs and destroyers of cultural identity. Didier Bigo has warned academics against accepting this negative linkage of migration and security as a ‘truth’, arguing that the link is, rather, a construction of those in a social position to speak the language of security authoritatively. The irony, as Jef Huysmans points out, is that academics agreeing with Bigo are faced with the dilemma of ‘how to talk or write about the securitization of migration without contributing to a further securitization