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The Forum > Article Comments > Genocide in Sri Lanka: an inconvenient finding > Comments

Genocide in Sri Lanka: an inconvenient finding : Comments

By Bruce Haigh, published 11/2/2014

Similarly both Bishop and Carr have described Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka as 'economic migrants', in order to send them back to Sri Lanka without processing their claims to be refugees.

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JoN

"I have and continue to argue that Australia is not acting in good faith and in the light of the Refugee Convention and Protocol's 'objects and purpose'."

There is a world of difference between not acting in good faith and acting illegally.
Posted by Shadow Minister, Sunday, 23 February 2014 6:29:04 PM
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Jayb
Okay.

Bet your house then?

Keep looking, QC.

JO'N
I agree neither Labor nor Liberal are acting, nor have acted, in good faith under the Convention, for at least two decades.

Both parties want a bet each way. On the one hand they want to present themselves in fashionable circles as caring about human rights, hence the whole concern about the UN, and appearances, and signing on to Conventions.

On the other hand they have both been pursuing policies by underhand means on the ground to try to squirm out if the Convention for decades. For example Labor brought in the amendments to the Migration Act in 1994 I think it was, that removed from refugees the common law rights of judicial review.

Now ask yourself this: what sort of person would be okay with passing a law, that a person at risk of being persecuted, could be sent back to death or torture or prison, even though the decision was "so unreasonable that no reasonable person could make it", or was made in bad faith?

Rank hypocrisy characterises this whole field, and of course it hasn't just been the Labor party that are guilty of it.

But unlike you, I don't agree that appeal to so-called international "law" is the solution: I think it's the problem.

Firstly, what you are calling international "law" is factually different in kind from what we usually call law. Usually the term is used to mean the product of a territorial monopolist of the supply of law - the state - who claims to be able to, and can in fact enforce it. None of these apply to international law, which is more akin to mere custom than law.

Secondly, it assumes that international law derives its just principles from what you call "countries" - nation-states. But that is to assume the intrinsic justice of nation-states in the first place! Yet a nation-state is by definition a territorial monopolist of initiating aggression against person and property so there is *no reason whatsoever* for the idea that ...

(cont.)
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Sunday, 23 February 2014 9:28:40 PM
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... states have any presumptive competence, let alone superiority, when it comes to human rights.

For example in the last century, nation-states have killed over 200 million people. Over 100 million was states killing their own subjects. The nation-state is by far the most violent and abusive institution in the history of the world – and the enormities of the Huns, and the Tartars, or all the religious persecutions of history, pale in comparison to those of the nation-state, in a fraction of the time.

The morally and intellectually bankrupt idea you are propounding:
that rights are whatever states – or associations of states – say they are, and that states have a “right” to shunt the costs of their decisions onto whoever they feel like backed by their claimed monopoly of force, is no different at all from the idea that is overwhelmingly the main source of the problems
a) causing the refugee flows in the first place, virtually all of whom are victims of the statist creed, and
b) in the Australian governments – both parties – abusively tormenting the poor bastards – whom the Australian government has solemnly undertaken to protect – and locking them up indefinitely in the middle of nowhere, and just not processing them – again based on the same moral and legal and political theory.

And your solution is to appeal to an even more open-ended power of states to get together and declare anything they feel like to be a “law” and a “right”?

I don’t think so.

I reject the entire theory that people are nothing but a species of chattel owned by nation-states, for the political classes thereof to dispose as they decide unilaterally - or by agreement among themselves, which is the only amelioration you offer. I reject entirely the false pretences of the Australian government to any competence whatsoever to speak authoritatively about human rights.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Sunday, 23 February 2014 9:38:40 PM
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And you’re not offering to pay the costs of the values you profess, are you? You want others, who don’t agree with you, to be forced to pay:- abusive.

I would like to know why it wouldn't be a solution to your complaint to abrogate the Convention.

And why wouldn't it be a better and fairer solution, the Convention abrogated, to allow Australians individually or in groups, the freedom to sponsor all the refugees they want, provided they indemnify the rest of the community against all the costs, including of accommodation, assessment, settlement, and crimes?

Because as usual, the moralistic protestations of the left wing are fake. It's all about power and money, otherwise they'd put their money where their mouth is, and stop trying to use mere power to force other people, who don't agree with them, to submit and obey - the usual dreary statist creed they falsely claim to be above.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Sunday, 23 February 2014 9:38:48 PM
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JKJ: You raise a large number of points in your last three comments. I do not have the time to examine each of them and respond appropriately. I mean you no discourtesy in saying that.

May I say generally though that I do not disagree that nation states have been responsible for huge carnage throughout history. That is not an argument however, for either disbanding the nation state or rejecting the potential of international law as a possible means of addressing those wrongs. Recent history shows for example, that it is not the law that is deficient per se, but the unwillingness or inability to hold wrongdoers to account.

One has only to point to the illegal invasion of Iraq and the untold death and misery that caused and is causing, and note that Bush, Blair and Howard are still walking free. That makes a mockery of the concept of accountability for waging the "supreme crime" that was established in Nuremberg and Tokyo after WW2.

The only other brief comment I would make is that in effect handing over migration/refugee policy to individual sponsors as you suggest would be unworkable in practice. No government is going to abdicate that responsibility.

It is of course always open to a State to withdraw from a Convention. There is in my view no compellable argument to do so here, and it would not absolve us anyway.
Posted by James O'Neill, Monday, 24 February 2014 1:50:07 PM
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"One has only to point to the illegal invasion of Iraq and the untold death and misery that caused and is causing, and note that Bush, Blair and Howard are still walking free. That makes a mockery of the concept of accountability for waging the "supreme crime" that was established in Nuremberg and Tokyo after WW2."

Indeed. Open criminality. So much for the idea that the State, or the UN, has any credibility whatsoever as concerns human rights.

"Recent history shows for example, that it is not the law that is deficient per se, but the unwillingness or inability to hold wrongdoers to account."

The theory you are putting forward is no different to that which, by your own account, is causing the problem: that the "law" is whatever states say it is. It not only makes it easy for them to get out of it in practice. It spreads moral confusion but making it hard to recognise wrongdoing per se. All it takes is for states to declare their own abuses to be right, for you yourself to confuse their indefensible wrongdoings with what is right, which you do in the next sentence.

"The only other brief comment I would make is that in effect handing over migration/refugee policy to individual sponsors as you suggest would be unworkable in practice. No government is going to abdicate that responsibility."

Nothing you have said has shown that it would be unworkable in practice, nor that government has any such "responsibility" that does not depend on the abuses of their powers. You make *no* defence whatsoever of the use of aggressive violence to enforce the policies you advocate.

It is enough that I have shown
a) reason why abrogating the Convention would be more ethical, simpler and more pragmatic
b) that you have shown no reason why it wouldn't be, and
c) that you have shown no ethical or legal reason in favour of Austraalia's adherence to the Convention
d) that by your own standards there is no reason why anyone who accepts your premises, should accept your conclusion!
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Monday, 24 February 2014 2:25:14 PM
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