“The reality is, it seems very unlikely for that ever to be a mechanism that will provide any sort of recourse, so we can’t really get a binding determination from the International Court of Justice around whether this policy complies,” she said, of Australia’s approach to detaining asylum-seekers who arrive by boat.
In 2015, an opinion essay by The Times editorial board described Australia’s policies as “unconscionable,” as well as “inhumane, of dubious legality and strikingly at odds with the country’s tradition of welcoming people fleeing persecution and war.”
Those same policies appear to be the playbook for proposed legislation in Britain that would give the Home Office a “duty” to remove nearly all migrants who cross the English Channel on small boats, as my colleague Megan Specia reports.
The proposed legislation would allow the government to swiftly detain and deport anyone who arrives “in breach of immigration control,” the bill reads. “The main thing they have in common is in seeking to criminalize, almost, asylum, or at least to undermine the right to an institution of asylum,” said Ms. Foster, the legal scholar, of Britain’s and Australia’s policies.
“The Australian policy has been premised for a long time on the notion that if one arrives without prior authorization — and regardless of whether or not that individual is a refugee — that they’re somehow doing the wrong thing,” she said. “They’re illegal, they’re unlawful, they’re ‘unauthorized maritime arrival.’”
Even the three-word slogan is the same: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain appeared on Tuesday behind a pulpit emblazoned with the rallying cry “Stop the boats.” Tony Abbott, the Australian prime minister, used precisely the same language to promote his own policy a decade ago.
As in Australia, the policy is of questionable legality. On the first page of the proposed legislation, Suella Braverman, the British home secretary, writes that she is “unable to make a statement” that the bill is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. (The proposed legislation follows a plan by the government to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda that is currently being challenged in court.)
