The 800 boatpeople Australia plans to send to Malaysia will be granted immunity from the country’s harsh immigration laws, eliminating the threat of caning, reports said.
Rather than being sent to existing detention camps, they will spend six weeks in a new Australian-funded holding centre before being issued identity tags and released into the community, News Limited newspapers said. This will allow them to avoid being treated as illegal immigrants under Malaysian law, which will protect them from the possibility of caning and other punishments.
The Australian and the Sydney Daily Telegraph, citing unnamed sources, said the exemption would be granted through a seldom-used local law. Canberra is in advanced discussions with Malaysia on a plan to send 800 asylum seekers there in exchange for accepting some 4,000 of the Southeast Asian nation’s already registered refugees.
But there has been widespread concern that the group going to Malaysia could be mistreated with the country not a signatory to the UN refugees convention.
Despite the controversy, Australian Minister for Immigration Chris Bowen signalled that if all went well Malaysia may take more than the 800 boatpeople in the initial proposal.
Asylum seekers are a sensitive issue in Australia, where a record 6,900 illegal immigrants arrived by boat in 2010, mostly on vessels from Indonesia and usually hailing from strife-torn Iraq and Afghanistan, or Sri Lanka.