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Gillian Triggs says no one is copying Australia’s refugee policies
London: Gillian Triggs says the United Kingdom’s failure to send asylum seekers offshore has demonstrated to the rest of Europe that trying to copy Australia’s hardline methods doesn’t work.
In an interview to mark the end of her term in Geneva as the UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, the former Australian Human Rights Commission president backed the recent High Court ruling determining that Australia cannot detain people indefinitely as a “good outcome”.
Gillian Triggs, pictured here at Melbourne University in 2019, is finishing up at the UNHCR.Credit: Simon Schluter
She says the notion that Australia’s illegal methods for stopping the boats are serving as a model for European countries is “absurd and unworkable”, a fact reinforced by the UK’s failed attempts to offshore migrants to Rwanda.
“Australia is not a model for other countries,” Triggs said.
“The Australian model is not viewed favourably. Of course some on the right will say ‘they’ve stopped the boats’. That is true – for reasons that are illegal.
“But that model cannot work in the Mediterranean, nor can it work in the English Channel.”
For years Australia remained an international outlier due to its policy of intercepting boats bound for its shores and placing the asylum seekers and migrants aboard in offshore island detention centres.
The controversial policy, formulated by former prime minister John Howard in 2001, was broadly popular at home but internationally condemned by human rights bodies. In November, the High Court ruled that keeping people in immigration detention facilities indefinitely was illegal, overturning a central practice of Australia’s hardline border policy.
Triggs said several countries had explored adopting the “so-called Australian model” in the past three years, but had abandoned it after seeing the UK’s copycat approach that has racked up £240 million ($447 million) in costs and failed to deport a single asylum seeker since the policy’s announcement in 2022.
“What we’ve seen over the last 18 months or so has been a decision by those EU countries that flirted with the idea, they’ve retreated completely away from it because they do not want to be associated with the opprobrium, the cost and the political turmoil that it’s created,” she said.
“And I say this with great pleasure, they have decided to go into the EU pact – the pact’s not perfect, but it’s a very good achievement.”
The EU last week agreed to share the responsibility of dealing with migrants who journey across the Mediterranean.
Asylum seekers will be detained while their claims are processed over 12 weeks. EU states that do not want to accept refugees will pay into a fund to help share the costs of processing and accepting refugees, currently borne by Greece and Italy.
Triggs says countries do have a right to detain asylum seekers while their claims are processed, but only for a few weeks while health and security checks are carried out.
“It’s about the way in which that detention is carried out, and what Australia has done is detain indefinitely.”
On the High Court ruling overturning indefinite detention she says: “Excellent, that’s a good outcome.”
“It’s taken 20 years for the High Court of Australia, that would be reached in a matter of weeks or months in Europe and the UK.”
Triggs says that preventative detention could be used for people deemed serious security risks, “but that’s controlled by judges”.
Migration has become a top issue across several continents ahead of 2024’s blockbuster year of elections, and the issue has already propelled Geert Wilders’ far-right party to political highs in the Netherlands.
It has also triggered debate about whether the Refugee Convention is fit for purpose to deal with modern mass migration movements.
“We see it as more fit for purpose than it’s ever been,” Triggs said.
“Where it fails is where countries have not implemented it properly, the classic example being the UK and Australia refusing to allow a process of asylum.”
She says it is ironic that Australia then turned to the UN’s program to resettle asylum seekers languishing in Nauru and Papua New Guinea to New Zealand.
“This is disgraceful for a country like Australia, with the resources and skills and sophistication; it’s extraordinary that that’s what they’ve chosen to do.
“Australia benefits from a rules-based system, you can’t just pick the bits you like and discard the ones you don’t like.”
But Triggs says the UNHCR is sympathetic to countries trying to cope with the blurring of economic migrants into asylum seeker routes.
Gillian Triggs and former senator George Brandis (later High Commissioner to the UK from 2018 to 2022) during budget estimates at Parliament House in May 2017.Credit: Andrew Meares
“These are what we call mixed movements.”
The UNHCR is trialling a new whole-of-journey approach that involves identifying economic migrants as early as possible and linking them through the UN bodies, the private sector and NGOs, as well as immigration programs by countries in need of labour.
“If we can make that determination earlier along the route, then the person concerned knows they’re never going to be a refugee under any proper legal system,” Triggs said.
“They’ve got to face the fact that what they want is an economic opportunity, so let’s help them.
“That is where we could start setting up one-stop shops with rapid asylum processes and information for those who will not be refugees but need opportunities,” she said, adding that the concept was already being trialled.
“This is starting to work in the Americas – it’s a brilliant and innovative approach, funded largely by the United States, but it’s showing that you can deal with these mixed movements in a faster and more effective manner, and you can, that way, keep people out of the hands of people smugglers.”
She says working with private companies to develop business opportunities along migration routes, citing IKEA as a prime example, is also key to stopping journeys from ending in the sea.
“None of these are solutions in themselves, but they are part of a wider solution that will help us deal with it.”
“No country can respond effectively unilaterally. Tunisia can’t do it alone, Italy can’t do it alone, the US can’t do it alone – and it’s now working much more collaboratively and it has massively increased its resettlement program to 125,000 places this year.”
She says global instability is contributing to mass movements, noting that the UNHCR has had to deal with more than 40 crises this year – double the average.
But she says there are reasons to be optimistic, despite fears that migration could fuel the populist right to political success in 2024’s mega year of elections, pointing to the way Europe – particularly Poland and Moldova – have welcomed 8.3 million Ukrainians following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“That is a massive movement of people, and yet Europe coped perfectly well … the sky didn’t fall in,” she says.
Triggs departed Australia after years of a torrid political battle over human rights with the then-Coalition government.
She says she is hoping to keep a low profile when her role at UNHCR ends, but plans to write a book proposing ways the UN can deal with the refugee challenge. She is already the author of Speaking Up, published in 2018.
“I’ll keep well out of the public eye, but I will use my voice, I must play a role.”
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