A 19-year-old Canberra woman told Australian senators she feared herself and her mother and sister could be jailed or sent back to Sri Lanka if a new Australian migration bill became law.
Piumetharshika Kaneshan, a 19-year-old nursing student from Canberra who escaped Sri Lanka with her family, said the threat of being jailed or deported was a heavy burden to carry.
The Australian federal Government’s proposed changes to migration law are “entirely incompatible with human rights” and the government should abandon its bill, human rights groups told a Senate committee scrutinising the legislation.
Last month, the Government introduced legislation which would allow it to jail people refusing to cooperate with deportation for between one and five years.
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“I am … one of the people who might be jailed if this bill is passed into law,” Kaneshan had said.
She said she was representing a group of Iranian and Sri Lankan women whose cases had been held up by the Abbott government’s fast-track system reviewing their protection claims about a decade ago.
“This is our home, we don’t have any other home … don’t make us lose our homes.”
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Several diaspora groups including from the Iranian, Kurdish, South Sudanese and Zimbabwean communities opposed the “unchecked” powers that would be vested in the Immigration Minister under the new bill.
In giving evidence before a Senate committee examining the legislation, senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC), Laura John, laid out her concerns and stressed the committee should recommend the bill not be passed.
Acting Legal Director at HRLC, Sanmati Verma, who sat beside Ms Kaneshan as she gave evidence, later told reporters the bill was “an attack on migrant and refugee communities.”
She expressed concern about why the minister would seek to have such strong powers, that she feared could impact on someone like Ms Kaneshan.
Speaking ahead of Monday’s committee, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles said the legislation was needed to close a “loophole.”
He said the power was needed because the government currently was “very limited” in the ways it could remove people from Australia who had no further legal options to remain in Australia, and where the countries they originally came from, did not accept their return. (AAP / ABC News / Colombo Gazette)
