Australia: East Timor could process asylum seekers

[July 06, 2010]  SYDNEY (AP) -- Australia's new leader proposed Tuesday to stop an influx of asylum seeker boats by making East Timor a hub for processing U.N. refugee claims for people fleeing war and persecution -- an idea the tiny, impoverished nation said it was still considering.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said she also had discussed the proposal with U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres -- who has apparently not yet signed off on it.

Gillard's announcement was a shift in policy that aims to defuse a politically and racially charged debate that has flared in Australia ahead of elections expected to be held within months.

Australia receives just a tiny proportion of the world's asylum seekers, but in the past three years has witnessed a surge of people arriving via Indonesia in rickety boats -- some 150 in the past three years carrying around 4,000 people.

Each new boat receives wide media coverage and stirs feelings among many Australians that the country is being forced to take them in.

The asylum seekers, mostly Afghans and Sri Lankans who have paid criminal syndicates to bring them to Australia, have overflowed a detention center at remote Christmas Island -- an Australian territory -- and many have been moved to the mainland while their applications are assessed.

In her first major speech touching on foreign policy, Gillard on Tuesday said Australia had an obligation to treat legitimate asylum seekers fairly while also ensuring its borders are secure.

She proposed the creation of a regional center for processing refugee claims under U.N. auspices, and said that East Timorese President Jose Ramos Horta had agreed to discuss the possibility. Gillard said she had proposed the idea to Guterres, though she did not say what his response was.

"A regional processing center removes the incentive, once and for all, for the people smugglers to send boats to Australia," Gillard said. "Why risk a dangerous journey if you will simply be returned to the regional processing center?"

Some refugee advocates cautiously welcomed the plan, as long as applications were assessed under U.N. guidelines, applicants were treated humanely, and that other countries agreed to accept those who were judged to be legitimate asylum seekers.

"From our perspective this is a positive thing," said John Gibson, the president of the Refugee Council of Australia.

He said it differed from an earlier government's system of detaining asylum seekers in prison-like camps on the pacific island of Nauru because it would involve the United Nations.

Others said Gillard's plan recalled the earlier policy, dubbed the "Pacific solution," and called for more details.

"If what the government has in mind is simply a re-badged Pacific solution then this is of course unacceptable," said Claire Mallinson of Amnesty International.

Gillard said New Zealand had been asked to support the plan -- a likely sign the country would be asked to resettle some people whose applications were approved for refugee status at the center.

She offered few other details -- such who would pay for the East Timor center -- but said she would pursue the idea "relentlessly."

East Timor's Deputy Prime Minister Jose Luis Guterres said the government was considering Gillard's plan, but that his impoverished nation was not ready to establish such a center, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.

"We have so many issues that we have to deal with and bringing another problem, another issue to the country, I don't think it's wise for any politician to do it," Guterres was quoted as saying.

Australia grants nearly 14,000 places a year to migrants for humanitarian reasons, among nearly 190,000 total migrants a year, according to official figures. Fewer than 2 percent of humanitarian immigrants arrive by boat from Asia.

While migration is generally accepted as positive for the country -- Gillard herself is Welsh-born and emigrated as a toddler with her family -- Australians have long been divided on the issue of sea-borne asylum seekers.

Many people want the government to take a tougher line, while others advocate a more open policy. The issue has helped decide elections in the past.

Gillard named the issue as a top priority soon after ousting Kevin Rudd as prime minister in a June 24 revolt in their Labor Party. Gillard on Tuesday sought to appeal to both sides of the debate.

"It is wrong to label people who are concerned about unauthorized arrivals as rednecks," Gillard said.

She later added, "Australians' basic decency does not accept the idea of punishing women and children by locking them up behind razor wire, or ignoring people who are fleeing genocide, torture and persecution."

The leader of the main conservative opposition party, Tony Abbot, also launched his policy on Tuesday with a promise to "turn back the boats" with tough measures against asylum seekers arriving by sea.

[Associated Press; By ROHAN SULLIVAN]

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