A recent Australian Human Rights Commission report on risk management in immigration detention has come and gone with little notice. To many readers the topic will seem recondite and the possibility of it producing change low. Both the report and the response to it by the Department of Home Affairs, however, demonstrated the irrelevance of human rights in the development and administration of policy concerning people who seek asylum.
The report itself is methodical and helpful, offering an overview of the number and variety of Australian immigration detention centres, the categories of people held in them and the points at which perceived risks are eliminated at the cost of respect for the humanity of the people detained. The report and its recommendations were informed by interviews with people detained, visitors to the centres and officers of the Australian Border Force. The recommendations are modest, but if fully implemented would make the conditions of people detained marginally less soul-destroying.
The report also offers examples of the human effects of risk management procedures on people. The possibility of smuggling or introducing harmful substances in food, for example, prevented a visitor from bringing in a cake for a detained child to celebrate her second birthday party.
The report and the response reveal the gulf between the philosophies and priorities of the government and its plaintiffs. People who take human rights seriously do so because they believe in the unique value of each human being. For this reason they believe that law and its administration must work within a framework of respect for human dignity. They expect that if they point out violations of human rights the response will either deny such violation or will correct it by changing legal and administrative processes. Humanity trumps instruments of control.
The Australian government's treatment of people who seek asylum, however, is based on subordinating the humanity and rights of people to a policy of control, with all the laws and processes that implement it. Humanity and human rights are expendable when set against instrumental policies and regulations. That is true of the detention regime generally and of the way in which it is administered. The distress and loss of faith in humanity of a family whose birthday party is spoiled counts for nothing in comparison with the goal of seamless control.
The Department's response to the Commission's recommendations is understandable in this context. It is unyielding to its insistence, based on Australian policy, that the integrity of the detention regime be maintained and that the controlling principle of its administration is security. To visitors to the centres the response will read as a chilling demonstration of power over humanity. The Commission's appeal to human rights will seem like a little boy holding a flower to turn back an advancing tank.
The difficulty with policy that is built on disregarding the humanity of those whom it touches, whether it be in immigration, justice, welfare, Indigenous affairs or health, is that its administration produces the risks to whose elimination it then gives priority. To take one example, the report pleads for more discrimination in relating the conditions of detention to the risk of violent or disruptive behaviour. The response insists on the priority of security against such behaviour.
"To beg respect for human rights is a merciful thing to do. But Boochani's scream of outrage at the injustice of it all seems a cleaner response."
Violent and disruptive behaviour, however, may be expected when people have made atonement for crime by serving sentences in prison, or have been imprisoned indefinitely without having been found guilty of any offence, and are then promptly imprisoned again awaiting a protracted process of appeal. Harsh conditions of imprisonment designed to meet the risk of antisocial behaviour further encourage the cycle of fury and preventative repression.
The natural endpoint of this cycle is the punitive arbitrariness analysed by Behrouz Boochani in No Friend but the Mountains. People are treated as risks to be managed in a way that eliminates all risk, and are therefore stripped of their humanity.
The arbitrariness of the treatment of people in detention, indicated at many points of this report, reflects the operative principle that all risk is to be avoided whatever the cost to the humanity of the people detained. In Boochani's experience and description, Australians were homogenous and unreflective parts of a machine designed to dehumanise, cow and corrupt the people who sought protection from persecution. This report and the departmental response suggest that in on-shore detention the human destruction is not directly intended. It is seen simply as irrelevant.
To beg respect for human rights, as the AHRC report does, is a merciful thing to do, and if crumbs of concession fall from the tables of the powerful, the humiliation of begging will have been worthwhile. But in the long run Boochani's scream of outrage at the injustice of it all seems a cleaner, if in the short term no more effectual, response.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.