Amnesty International yesterday used full-page ads in Australian newspapers to accuse border protection officials of illegally paying people smugglers and endangering lives in their efforts to prevent asylum seeker boats from reaching Australia.
The London-based human rights group’s extraordinary advertising campaign in Australia’s largest cities of Sydney and Melbourne followed the release of a report, By Hook or By Crook, on Wednesday condemning the government’s highly secretive Operation Sovereign Borders, a flotilla that has all but stopped asylum-seeker boats.
The government has rejected the report, calling it a calling it a disgraceful slur that will change nothing.
Photo: AFP
Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, who counts stopping the boats among the greatest achievements of the government he led for two years until last month, used a speech in London this week to urge Europe to employ similar methods to stem the flow of migrants.
Amnesty claims that Australian officials were “complicit in a transnational crime” in May when they paid people smugglers US$32,000 to take a boat carrying 65 asylum seekers bound for New Zealand to an Indonesian port.
Amnesty said this could constitute illegally funding human trafficking.
“Our Australian officials operate in accordance with domestic Australian law and in accordance with our international obligations,” Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop told reporters.
Australian Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton rejected the report as a “slur” and said Canberra would not be “bullied” into changing its policies.
“People on intercepted vessels are held lawfully in secure, safe, humane, and appropriate conditions by the personnel of the Australian Border Force [ABF] and the Australian Defence Force [ADF],” his spokesman said.
“To suggest otherwise, as Amnesty has done, is to cast a slur on the men and women of the ABF and ADF,” the spokesman said.
Dutton added in comments made on commercial radio that Amnesty’s allegations were “a disgrace.”
“I think in the end you can take the word of the people smugglers or you can take the word of our staff at Australian Border Force and people will make their own judgements,” he said.
“We’re not going to be bullied into some watering down of that, because people drown at sea and our detention centers fill,” he said.
Australia’s Fairfax Media reported in June that an Indonesian police investigation had concluded that smugglers had been paid more than US$30,000 to take a boat loaded with asylum seekers back to Indonesia.
Government ministers at the time denied that the ABF and defense officials ever paid money to people smugglers. However, that denial did not extend to intelligence officials, who are understood to pay criminal informants for information.
The government says it never comments on intelligence or security issues.
Don Rothwell, an Australian National University expert on international law, said that if Australian officials had paid traffickers, they had broken the law.
However, if the money was paid by intelligence officers, the attorney-general would have to authorize any prosecution under Australian law, he said.
“The potential for prosecutions under Australian law ... would appear rather remote,” Rothwell said.
Amnesty also accuses Australia of endangering 65 asylum seekers by forcing them from a well-equipped boat onto overcrowded boats with inadequate fuel for their journey back to Indonesia.
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