CROSSBENCH senator Ricky Muir last week described his decision to back the Abbott Government’s draconian legislation on refugees and asylum seekers as “a choice between a bad option and a worse option”.

He was right and, with his vote, Australia is now effectively a rogue state when it comes to international law and respect for basic human rights.

With the passage of the Bill we have erased any references to our obligations under the United Nations Convention on Refugees. This was a document that emerged in the aftermath of the horrors of World War II, and one that Australia helped formulate.

In June this year the UNHCR released a report showing the number of refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people worldwide had, for the first time since WWII, topped

50 million people. Of these, 16.7 million people are classified as refugees.

In the face of this global crisis the response from Australia — one of the wealthiest nations on Earth — has been to cut our refugee resettlement intake from overseas and pass cruel, callous legislation that is arguably in breach of international law.

We cage asylum seekers in what can only be described as tropical gulags — hellholes where disease, violence, depression and sexual assault festers — and refer to them as “illegal” even though they have committed no crime.

When Immigration Minister Scott Morrison and his supporters talk of “illegals” they are lying, in an effort to dehumanise and demonise. As Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes perfectly clear: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”

We deny refugees and asylum seekers fair and timely assessment and then when and if their claims have eventually been processed, we effectively deny them entry to Australia.

And bear in mind here that as of the latest figures available, about 70 per cent of the more than 2000 detainees languishing behind wire in the Manus Island and Nauru compounds who have had their claims processed have had positive determination of their refugee status.

For them there will be no resettlement here. They can languish on Nauru for a few years, possibly be resettled in Papua New Guinea — perhaps shipped off to that bastion of democracy and human rights known as Cambodia — or, for some, be offered a Temporary Protection Visa that may eventually see them shipped off to anywhere in the world of the minister’s choosing anyway.

media_camera A protest and vigil for Iranian asylum seeker, Hamid Kehazaei, who was flown by air ambulance from Manus Island to Brisbane’s Mater Hospital in September after an untreated skin infection turned into septicaemia. A request to fly him out was delayed including due to his lack of a visa. His life support was turned off after the was pronounced brain dead. Photo: Liam Kidston

It is a policy of deliberate cruelty perpetrated by both sides of politics, but taken to new — to use Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s description — sociopathic depths by Morrison last week.

Morrison effectively used children in detention as pawns to blackmail his legislation through the Senate, saying to the likes of Muir: “Pass my Bill and I’ll release the kids.”

This ignores the fact that he (and Labor before him) has the power at any time to release those children. It is hard to imagine a more cynically exploitative abuse of process and human life, and this from a man who professes to be a Christian. And here it is a shame Muir and others didn’t stand firm and say “Release the children first, and then we’ll negotiate”.

With the passage of his Bill Morrison is now virtually omnipotent when it comes to unfettered — and unchecked — control over other people’s lives.

Asylum seekers arriving by boat will no longer have access to the Refugee Review Tribunal. Their cases will be considered on a “fast track” basis without even formal interviews and they are denied natural justice in the form of access to our courts, with any appeals instead being heard internally by Morrison’s department.

Morrison has the power to individually refuse refugee status on the nebulous grounds of “national interest” or “character”. He does not have to publish his reasons.

Worse, he has the power to deport people anywhere in the world, even if that places them at risk of torture. The relevant clause dictates that an unlawful non-citizen must be removed regardless: “It is irrelevant whether Australia has non-refoulement obligations in respect of an unlawful non-citizen.”

media_camera Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has the ability to individually refuse refugee status. Pic: AFP/William WEST

As the Law Council of Australia pointed out in a Senate Committee submission last month, “the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties requires States to implement their obligations in good faith and stipulates that a State may not invoke the provisions of internal law as a justification of its failure to perform its obligations under a treaty …”

The LCA also argues that the rule of law requires “Executive powers to be carefully defined by law, so that it is not up to the Executive to determine what powers it has, and how they should be used”, and “Executive decision-making to comply with the principles of natural justice and be subject to meaningful judicial review.”

Scratch that. What would a few lawyers know about justice?

It is tempting to argue for a royal commission to uncover the true horrors and abuse of law inherent in Australia’s maltreatment of the world’s most vulnerable, but given this government’s unilateral ruthlessness the findings would likely be ignored.

Future generations will look back on this dark period in Australian history with profound shame and regret. Many of us feel that way already.

paul.syvret@news.com.au