Italy Processes Asylum Seekers In 2 Months – No Detention

It is reported that five people have committed suicide in Australian Detention Centres in the past seven months.

A 19 year old Afghan asylum seeker committed suicide at the remote Curtin Detention Centre last night. Refugee advocates say he had been moved there from Christmas Island, had been in detention 10 months, and as a Hazara man he would have faced persecution had he been forced to return to Afghanistan.

Appalling Conditions

The advocates also say that the conditions at the Centre are appalling – not enough showers, phones etc, and filthy. It is also a very remote part of the far north-west.

Most Boat People Are Genuine Refugees

Past figures show that 70-97% of asylum seekers arriving here by boat are found to be genuine refugees. Therefore their applications to live in Australia will eventually be accepted – but possibly after two years detention.

WHY does processing take so long?

What Italy Is Doing With Its Huge Numbers Of Asylum Seekers

The ABC’s Emma Alberici has just posted the following:

Having just returned from Sicily contemplating the growing humanitarian crisis in North Africa, it was stark to watch Julia Gillard tell the Parliament that the attempts by 200 asylum seekers on Christmas Island to escape incarceration was ‘wrong’.

The UNHCR – the United Nations refugee agency – has long argued that what Australia did to these people in the first place was, to quote, ‘grossly wrong’. According to their advice, people who have fled desperate poverty or persecution or both should not be held behind bars and barbed wire. The Prime Minister has continued to justify the Government’s dogged stance with the spurious suggestion that keeping new arrivals in detention is protecting the public from an unknown danger.

There are no detention centres in Italy where, over the past six weeks, 16,000 people have arrived by boat from Tunisia. Between 12 to 13 boats are leaving Tunisia every day. People who arrive by boat are put into holding centres but they’re not locked up… they come and go as they please. On average, it takes two months to process asylum claims. Once a person’s identity is established they are given one of two potential documents – either please leave the country within five days or you are free to live in Italy. There are some obvious inadequacies with the Italian way. When handed one of the documents, where do you go when you have no money and are in a foreign country whose language you don’t speak? There are no jobs in Italy. More than one third of those under 25 are out of work.

A Better System Has Been Tried And Tested

Kate Gauthier, a contributing author to the Centre for Policy Development’s recent publication, More Than Luck: Ideas Australia needs now writes that Both Parties Are All At Sea On Asylum Policy:

“Starting in 2005 the Community Care Pilot (CCP) provided intensive casework, psycho-social support and, where necessary, housing and income support to vulnerable people in the immigration regime. The results were startling to the Howard Government – immigration cases were resolved faster, it was a lot cheaper and people who were rejected for visas were more likely to return home voluntarily rather than appeal the rejection or require forced deportation. In other words, community-based processing of asylum seekers results in greater compliance with the system and better outcomes for Australia.

Yet neither party wants to use this proven method, because it doesn’t play well to the electorate. But the evidence shows that asylum seekers should be released from detention and processed in the community. Not because it’s compassionate and not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it works and it saves hundreds of millions of dollars.

Unfortunately, both sides of politics have decided to go back to the old ways of using asylum seekers as weapons in their policy trench-warfare. But like most wars, it costs a lot of our money and is pretty useless in achieving its perceived goal. But it is great at achieving the real goal – to distract the public and the media from investigating the real problems facing Australia. The fix is in.”

Boat people are being treated as political footballs. This doesn’t help us or them.