Dr Caroline Fleay and Dr Lisa Hartley attended the Third International Conference on Human Rights and Peace and Conflict in Southeast Asia in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 15-17 October 2014. They both presented a paper on a panel entitled “Regional Responses to Asylum Seekers: Human Rights and the Shrinking Protection Spaces in Southeast Asia and Australia’ with colleagues Tze Yeng Ng, and Melisa Tan (Health Equity Initiatives, Malaysia), and Taka Gani (Jesuit (Refugee Service, Indonesia). The panel discussed the shrinking access to protection and the human rights violations experienced by refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia.
While in Kuala Lumpur, Caroline and Lisa also visited Health Equities Initiatives (HEI), an NGO that aims to advance the right to health for asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia through capacity building, monitoring and advocacy initiatives. Here, they met with representatives from refugee community groups from Burma and heard about the increasingly difficult challenges they face while living in Malaysia. Like most countries in the Asia Pacific, asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia have no right to work legally and have very limited access to education and to health services. They are also at risk of being arrested and indefinitely detained. Currently, there are 150,000 refugees living in Malaysia. Around 92 per cent of them fled the violence and persecution of neighbouring Burma/Myanmar where government forces continue to target ethnic minority groups. We also understand that there may be more than 300,000 people living in Malaysia who are yet to be recognised by the UNHCR as refugees. Some asylum seekers are having to wait up to three years for their initial refugee status determination interview with the UNHCR and those found to be a refugee continue to wait years, and sometimes a lifetime, to be resettled to a third country.
The visit reinforced the urgent need for Australian government to significantly increase the offshore resettlement quota through the Australia’s Refugee and Humanitarian Programme. While the former Labor Government increased the places allocated through this programme to 20,000, the Coalition Government reduced this to 13,750. Through significantly increasing the numbers accepted under the Refugee and Humanitarian Programme, Australia could provide more refugees, including family members of refugees already living in Australia, their only real option for resettlement.
