Paris Peace Accords 23 Oct. 1991

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Refugee settlement in Cambodia 'a dodgy deal', says Sarah Hanson-Young

Refugee settlement in Cambodia 'a dodgy deal', says Sarah Hanson-Young

Rights groups express concern over country’s record of sending refugees to countries where they face persecution


Sarah Hanson-Young
Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young speaks during an interview in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photograph: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young has lambasted Australia’s $40m refugee resettlement programme with Cambodia as “bribe money” to get the southeast Asian nation to “do the dirty work that [Australia] doesn’t want to do itself”, and says the deal should be called off.

“There’s no future here,” the senator told the Phnom Penh Post during a week-long ‘fact-finding mission’ in Cambodia regarding the deal. “Before long, [refugee] families might be on the move again.”


Hanson-Young has been meeting with opposition leaders, touring slum neighbourhoods and interviewing asylum seekers in an attempt to understand what life would “really be like” for refugees who choose to be resettled here. She underscored Cambodia’s few provisions regarding proper education, difficulty for refugees to find jobs, and an overall lack of mental health services as reasons why the nation may not be an ideal resettlement option. 

“When families arrive here — from everything that I can see — it’s not going to be a life that they can easily rebuild,” she said. “It strikes me that Australia will simply be dumping refugees in Cambodia back into a system of ‘displaced people’.

“It’s a dodgy deal, it’s a dud deal, and it should end.”

Her comments come just one day after immigration minister Scott Morrison announced that refugees who registered with the UNHCR in Indonesia after June this year would no longer be able to seek resettlement in Australia — a move that has been condemned by Labor, Greens and various human rights groups

Hanson-Young said the changes were “arrogant” and “total madness”.

“We are at a situation where we’re paying other countries to take refugees from our nation, and at the same time we’re cutting the numbers of people we resettle ourselves from the region.”

Morrison has dismissed the senator’s mission as untimely and pointless, telling Sydney radio station 2GB that “facts and Sarah Hanson-Young aren’t two things that readily spring to mind”.

“She has turned up at the wrong time,” he added. “The on-the-ground arrangements are not in place at the moment and it is still going to be some time before they get in place. So she will go over there, she will whinge and complain like she always does and people will ignore her as they should.”

Hanson-Young has invited acting opposition leader Kem Sokha to Australia to discuss Cambodia’s opposition to the deal, which he has agreed to do. Sokha claims the Australian embassy in Phnom Penh has repeatedly ignored his requests to meet and talk about concerns over the programme.

“It’s not just us [CNRP, the opposition party], but almost half the nation that supports the CNRP are worried about the deal,” Sokha told the Post.

Rights and aid groups, along with the UN and international law experts, have questioned the validity of the $40m resettlement programme, which would see Australia provide just one year’s resettlement support for refugees currently detained on Nauru to be willingly moved to Cambodia and provided with language and job training, public education and basic health services. The programme was initially meant to see up to 1,000 refugees resettled from Nauru, but Cambodia may start out with only four or five refugees instead.

Critics of the deal say that Cambodia — one of the poorest and most corrupt nations in the world — already struggles with administering services to its own population, and fundamentally lacks the capacity and wherewithal to handle refugees. Human Rights Watch has called the nation’s refugee record as “mired in serious human rights abuses” and points to the fact it has previously sent asylum seekers back to their home countries where they faced persecution, despite being a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention.

The Cambodian government has defended the deal, saying on Monday that it would continue with the programme, despite public opposition.

“I think that normally when the Cambodian government does something, it will not satisfy all Cambodians,” said foreign ministry spokesman Koy Kuong. “However, in the end … things will go smoothly without the problems that they expected.”


1 comment:

  1. Both Abbot and Hun Sen are 'Mad dog' as far as the refugees [on this planet earth] are concerned. Our hat off to you Sen. Sarah. God bless the refugees of the world.

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