The reality in search of an ethical policy

In late March of this year, and again in this last week, an estimated 500 people drowned when their boats ran into major trouble off the coasts of Italy and Greece. Many among them were children, some even newborn. 

These human tragedies are yet further horrific reminders of the risks people are forced to take to escape desperate political or economic circumstances.  

Were such circumstances to afflict our lives, have no doubt, we would behave in exactly the same way.    

In the wake of these tragedies come the ritual expressions of ‘deep sorrow’ that should leave no-one ‘indifferent’ or ‘unmoved’.  And yet, once again, little if anything changes, not even the rhetoric. ‘We’ look away because it happens to ‘them’. Despite ‘their’ multiple and recurring tragedies, ‘they’ are designated a ‘threat’ to us – an ‘invasion’ always on the verge of happening.    

In the face of increasing populist posturing and weak and failed political leadership, EU migration policy continues to condemn more than 2,000 people to death in the seas around Malta and further afield annually. As the history of the EU unfolds, this will be one of the EU's greatest and most condemnable failures.

A policy that now amounts to nothing short of weaponised inhumanity as the EU continues to pay Libyan militias millions to detain potential migrants, condemning them to hunger, ill-health, violence, rape, and even death, the reality harrowingly described in Sally Hayden’s reporting. 

A policy defined not by appropriate protection but by vindictive punishment.  And all to save us from the ‘invasion’ of the small boats and the rubber dinghies.

As we all look away and scramble for that ‘get out’ clause - the one we like to think absolves us of any responsibility of any kind - it is worth revisiting some of the core truths surrounding this agenda. They are truths we prefer to ignore or dismiss.

The movement of people across politically created borders is age-old, something all societies have experienced and practised.  Such movement has been fuelled primarily but not exclusively by conflict, persecution, and deprivation and now also by climate change.  Despite the growing hysteria, it remains a minor challenge for western states because the vast majority of refugees and migrants live in middle and low-income countries.

Malta and Australia have both been shaped by many past and present realities of migration. Those realities have fundamentally and positively defined our histories, our cultures, and our ways of life. And yet, we selectively fulminate against migrants and refugees while denying the centrality of migration in our own stories.

Today, while Malta joins the EU in forcing people back to oppression (claiming it doesn’t actually see them), Britain seeks to ‘export’ them for ‘processing’ in Rwanda and Australia continues to operate detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea as well as a number on the Australian mainland. People seeking asylum have been held in detention in such centres for a decade or more, all for seeking protection, an act that is entirely legal under Australian and international law. 

‘Legal and illegal’ doesn’t even enter the equation, we conflate both asylum seekers and migrants into a general category of ‘foreigners’, upon whom all forms of prejudice and discrimination can be visited. While being legal signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention, we deny its principles as well as its spirit, not to mention the legal obligations that are required of signatories to the Convention.   

No ifs and buts, seeking asylum is a legal act for signatories of the Refugee Convention – it does not depend on our individual or collective prejudices or conveniences. Our migration policies, if they exist, are what should determine attitudes and behaviours towards migrants, not economic or political convenience. The Convention states that a person seeking asylum is not to be punished for their method of arrival. Yet, increasingly in Europe and Australia people who arrive by boat are denied their liberty, a punishment normally reserved in these jurisdictions for the most serious of actual crimes. 

This is particularly ironic in Australia, a country settled by people who came by boat and took away the land, culture, language, and children of the Aboriginal people who had lived on the southern continent for more than 60,000 years. Perhaps those who come by boat hold up a mirror to the rest of us to see the history from whence we came.

In the absence of any realistic, defensible, or just policy, we allow the agenda to become a political football played by teams of opportunist politicians, media commentators or just plain racists.

When we strip back the pseudo rationales and the invented justifications, we are left with a stark and shaming truth – ‘they’ are simply not as valuable, worthy, or important as ‘us’. Through denying their innate human dignity, needs and rights, we reveal our inner selves. And we then go about the business of funding, building, polishing, and justifying a philosophy and an architecture of exclusion. 

Phil Glendenning is a human rights activist, and immediate past president of Australian Refugee Council.

Colm Regan is a human rights activist, and teacher.