Tamil "Mandate" Refugees, left homeless, languish in foreign camps
[TamilNet, Sunday, 16 June 2013, 15:21 GMT]
Hundreds of Tamil refugees, including several hundreds who have been
declared as "Mandate" refugees by the United Nations High Commission for
Refugees (UNHCR) in compliance with the UNHCR Charter and associated
statutes, are languishing in camps in East Asian countries, and recently
in Dubai, while Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the
Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) and the U.S.,
which have traditionally admitted mandate and convention refugees, are
denying resettlement to many of these refugees. Australia, which is one
of the contracting countries with UNHCR, is even keeping in detention,
citing security threat, Tamil boat refugees who have been granted
asylum.
New Zealand has routinely rejected
applications for admission and resettlement of Tamil "mandate" refugees,
even while the quotas for UNHCR recommended refugee intakes were not
exceeded, published documents show. While individual states can reach
independent determination of the refugee status based on the 1951 UN
Convention and 1967 protocol, "convention" refugees, legal sources say,
the differences are relatively few resulting in differing
determinations.
"The rejection rates in Australia and New
Zealand are increasing, advocates of humane resettlement policy in both
countries say. While Australia, collaborating with Colombo whose alleged
genocidal crimes in Mu'l'livaaykkaal drove Tamils to flee Sri Lanka,
repatriates many potential Tamil refugees while being accused of
violating non-refoulement guidelines of the U.N., New Zealand silently
rejects Tamil Mandate refugees even when UN-agreed quotas have not been
exceeded and the refugees pose no risk to security," Tamils Against
Genocide (TAG), a US-based rights group earlier said.
TamilNet
recently obtained a letter written by the Office of Hon Kate Wilkinson,
member of cabinet who held the portfolio of Immigration (before being
removed by Prime Minister John Key) in response to a query by a NZ MP.
The MP wrote to the Minister on behalf of a local New Zealand Tamil with
regards to a rejected Tamil asylum claimant who was alleged to be a
member of the Liberation Tigers. Full text of the letter follows:
"There is no blanket government policy which requires that those
associated with the Tamil Tigers be declined a visa or banned from
entering New Zealand.
The individual we discussed may be caught
by Immigration New Zealand (INZ) policy which requires that individuals
who pose a risk to New Zealand’s international reputation be declined a
visa.
When assessing whether Sri Lankans associated with the
Tamil Tigers pose such a risk, INZ considers the level of association a
person has had with the organisation on a case-by-case basis."
An activist closely involved with helping Tamil refugees told TamilNet,
"studying the cases of Tamil refugees rejected by New Zealand and other
countries mentioned here reveals an intriguing pattern. These countries
appear to readily accept Tamil refugees who have had affiliations with
Tamil militant groups that were working against the LTTE and those who
have had very limited association with the LTTE. These same countries
have consistently rejected Tamil refugees who have had long associations
with the LTTE even when the association is non-military.
"Indeed
one of the single mothers rejected was the wife of a well known
civilian journalist who was killed by artillery fire in 2008 in Vanni.
Her application has been rejected by Finland, Netherlands and New
Zealand.
"It's ironic that people who are the most vulnerable to
Sri Lanka's beastly methods of torture are the ones the liberal West is
unwilling to provide sanctuary," the refugee worker added.
Further, the Director of Deakin University’s Centre for Citizenship, Development and Human Rights,
Professor Damien Kingsbury, has pointed out that the Australian
Security Intelligence Organization's (ASIO's) investigations on the
eligibility of Tamil refugees "bore the hallmarks of an anti-Tamil campaign being directed by the Sri Lanka government."
As
seen, the discretionary powers afforded to the NZ Minister involves
assessing if the claimant posed a risk to NZ's "international
reputation," a overly broad-power, leaving a refugee with well-founded
fear of persecution at his country of birth and left homeless in a
foreign country, according to legal analysts in Washington.
"Only
sustained media exposure of the fate of the "mandate" and "convention"
refugees by the rejecting contracting countries, including legal action
for possible violation of international law, will pressure these
countries to be more sympathetic in accepting additional refugees," TAG
added when queried on the asylum progress.
TAG has followed the
plight of Tamil refugee families stranded outside Sri Lanka. Summary of
refugees whose details are available with TAG follows:
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TAG-UK has been pro-active in critically questioning the policy
documents of the UK-Border Agency, and has achieved legal rulings
favorable to refugees by showing many Tamil returnees have been
tortured, and that legal pro-Tamil activity in the UK can result in
persecution by Sri Lanka authorities.
Non-contracting countries,
and countries which use allowed temporal or geographical limitations,
can deny Convention status to mandate-refugees, legal sources say.
In
addition to the earlier mentioned Western liberal democracies,
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and the U.K. have also joined
the U.N. program offering resettlement in the last decade. Since 2007,
13 new countries, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany,
Hungary, Japan, Paraguay, Portugal, Spain, Romania and Uruguay, have
added their names to the UN's resettlement list, according to published
UNHCR documents.
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