By Samuel Miller
Impunity Watch Reporter, North America and Oceania
CANBERRA, Australia — Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Wednesday announced that Australia would accept 12,000 Syrians from persecuted minorities. This increase will be a supplementary intake, in addition to the 13,750 overall intake of confirmed refugees for 2015; the increase is expected to consist largely of Syrian refugees.
Australia will also give AU$44 million, or roughly $32 million USD, to the United Nations to directly pay for the support of 240,000 displaced people in countries neighboring Syria and Iraq.
The increase will be a one-time increase, rather than a permanent increase, and the refugees are to be granted permanent residency. The focus for the additional intake will be on women, children and families from persecuted minorities.
Some of the Prime Minister’s colleagues called for the priority of Australia’s intake to be Christians, prompting the Labor Party and others to declare that the places should be allocated on a needs basis, without qualification or discrimination.
Recently, Prime Minister Abbott confirmed the intake would include Christians, but not exclusively.
“There are persecuted minorities that are Muslim, there are persecuted minorities that are non-Muslim, and our focus is on the persecuted minorities who have been displaced and are very unlikely ever to be able to go back to their original homes,” said Prime Minister Abbott.
Treasurer Joe Hockey said it might take more than two years to resettle all of the 12,000-Syrian-refugees in Australia announced this week, and Prime Minister Abbott refused to include refugees languishing in offshore detention in the emergency intake.
Also announced Wednesday, the government has also decided that Australian combat aircraft would join bombing raids in Syria, extending the existing mission beyond the borders of Iraq where the operations are at the invitation of the Iraqi government.
The government’s decision to extend air strikes into Syria, a sovereign state, has been criticized in some quarters. Unlike Iraq, Syria has not asked for international help to fight IS.
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie said the UN had not approved the air strikes and the government’s claim it could make the strikes under “collective self-defense” was not true.
Article 51 of the UN charter guarantees “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations”.
Furthermore, in Papua New Guinea, Prime Minister Abbott insisted Syrian asylum seekers in Nauru and Manus Island detention centers would not be resettled as part of the intake. The Prime Minister stated that to do so “would encourage the evil trade of people smuggling.”
Australia refuses to resettle refugees who try to come to the country by boat and has a policy of turning back asylum-seeker boats, detaining refugees in Pacific camps and denying them resettlement in Australia even if they are found to be refugees.
For more information, please see:
BBC News — Migrant crisis: Australia ups refugee intake and plans Syria strikes – 9 September 2015
Defense News — Australia Boosts Refugee Intake, Extends Airstrikes To Syria – 9 September 2015
Military Times — Australia to launch airstrikes in Syria, take more refugees – 9 September 2015
