Australia should defend asylum policy: UN refugee agency

Australia should defend asylum policy: UN refugee agency
The United Nations' refugee agency said on Tuesday the deaths of asylum seekers on a boat near Indonesia reinforced the need for international solidarity on refugee policy.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said it is deeply saddened by the loss of life in the sinking. The UNHCR hopes to work with Indonesian authorities to register survivors as asylum seekers and determine if they could be given refugee status.

"The incident is a tragic reminder of the desperate and dangerous measures people will resort to when they are fleeing persecution in their home countries and seeking better protection and a brighter future," it said in a statement.

"This tragedy also reinforces the need for renewed international solidarity and cooperation to find protection options for people that would help reduce the need for these perilous journeys by boat."

Australian Federal Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said the government had been concerned such loss of life was inevitable under the current asylum seeker policy impasse.

He said the government wants the opposition to support legislation amending the Migration Act to allow asylum seekers arriving by boat to be sent to Malaysia for processing.

"We believe that in order to have a proper deterrent to stop people risking their lives at sea then you need to have a properly constructed regional offshore processing arrangement," Bowen told Sky News.

"We are seeing ... people smugglers having no regard for human life whatsoever and putting more people onto dangerous boats.

The Australian Greens' Immigration spokeswoman Sarah Hanson- Young said the best way to reduce the number of people using people smugglers was to beat their business model. It is reported that the asylum seekers paid up to 6,200 U.S. dollars each for their failed attempt to reach Australia.

She said increasing Australia's humanitarian intake and resettling more asylum seekers from camps in Indonesia and Malaysia was one of the measures to prevent similar tragedy while Labor government recently changed its party platform to aspire to lift Australia's refugee intake to 20,000 from 13,750. "What we can do is try to give people safer options," Hanson- Young said. "We should be offering more support to do that."

However, the opposition said the tragedy is linked to Labor government's decision to dismantle aspects of the coalition's border protection policy following the 2007 federal election.

Coalition senator Mitch Fifield said temporary protection visas were being abandoned as was an offshore processing center on Nauru.

"Sadly we have seen over 14,000 people come by boat courtesy of people smugglers and we have seen over 260 boats," Fifield told Sky News.

"This is a tragedy, but it is hard to get away from the fact that the uptake in the people-smuggler business happened after the current government changed their policies."

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said Labor refuses to acknowledge it is responsible for an asylum seeker policy that encourages people to get on boats.

"This government has processed no one offshore," he said.

"We made very clear to the government over many months why we believed the Malaysian policy was a failure," he said on ABC Television.

"It is incumbent upon the government to put a concrete proposal to the coalition so we can work together."

He claimed that there were no concrete proposal by the Labor government and he believed the coalition's policy to reopen an asylum seeker processing center on Nauru can be done under current law.

An asylum boat carrying more than 250 people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, headed for Australia, sank and capsized in high seas earlier on Saturday.

Indonesian officials reported 49 people had been rescued. Some survivors were found on an island, 200 kilometers away from the site of the shipwreck, and were taken to hospital in the town of Puger to be treated for severe dehydration.

English.news.cn   2011-12-20 20:23:39              
by Vienna Ma

CANBERRA, Dec. 20 ( Xinhua)