"A critical, interdisciplinary account of how refugees and their oral testimony are judged by refugee-receiving states. A comprehensive legal analysis of systems of refugee status determination in Australia and Canada and the role of narrative studies and narrative theory in understanding international refugee law and its application"--
In: Prepublication version of: 'Crimmigration and Refugees: Bridging Visas, Criminal Cancellations and "Living in the Community" as Punishment and Deterrence'' in Peter Billings, ed, Crimmigration in Australia: Law, Politics, and Society (Springer, 2019)
This article critically examines techniques employed by the Australian state to expand its control of refugees and asylum seekers living in Australia. In particular, it analyses the operation of Australia's unique Asylum Seeker Code of Behaviour, which asylum seekers who arrive by boat must sign in order to be released from mandatory immigration detention, with reference to an original dataset of allegations made under the Code. We argue that the Code and the regime of visa cancellation and re-detention powers of which it forms a part are manifestations of what Beckett and Murakawa call the 'shadow carceral state', whereby punitive state power is extended beyond prison walls through the blurring of civil, administrative and criminal legal authority. The Code contributes to Australia's apparatus of refugee deterrence by adding to it a brutal system of surveillance, visa cancellation and denial of services for asylum seekers living in the community.
Abstract Refugee externalization arrangements are increasingly common in refugee-receiving global North States. Such arrangements have broad-ranging and significant human rights implications, especially (but not only) for refugee women and LGBTQI refugees who may be at increased risk of gender- or sexuality-based harm. This is particularly the case where refugees are placed in situations of risk or harm as a result of a 'sending' State's extraterritorial regime, or where domestic laws in receiving States outlaw certain practices such as pregnancy termination or same-sex sexual activity. There has been limited scholarly analysis of the gendered impacts of externalization policies, and States rarely take into account the gendered implications of externalization when implementing these policies. This article examines the possibilities and limits of international human rights law to protect refugees at risk of gender- and sexuality-based harms through a focus on States' positive due diligence obligations. While there is limited jurisprudence on the scope of such obligations in the context of refugee externalization, the article emphasizes that due diligence human rights obligations require sending States to adopt effective measures to protect people from unlawful discrimination and from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Due diligence obligations also offer a vital accountability mechanism for violations in extraterritorial settings through their potential preventative, remedial, and visibility functions. Using the case study of Australia's extraterritorial asylum regime in the Pacific, the article argues that such obligations encompass identifying and addressing foreseeable risks of gender- and sexuality-based harm, both prior to forcibly transferring refugees abroad and on an ongoing basis. Further, it argues that the gender- and sexuality-based human rights impacts of Australia's externalization regime have immediate and urgent relevance as other States consider or implement similar policies.