A Cambodian solution

Aug 20th 2014, 13:07 by R.M. | SYDNEY

ON AUGUST 19th Australia’s government announced that it would grant temporary VISASto more than 1,500 asylum-seekers in detention, all of them children. Advocates for the refugees welcomed the news. The immigration ministry however is not about to soften the conservative government’s hard-line policy towards asylum-seekers who are still trying to reach Australia by boat. Tony Abbott, the prime minister, won office after making a promise to “stop the boats” 11 months ago. Now his government seems close to clinching a deal that would allow Australia to transfer its “boat people” from one of its offshore detention centres—to Cambodia.

Human-rights advocates, together with opposition politicians in both Australia and Cambodia, have slammed this plan. Bruce Haigh, a former Australian diplomat and a former member of the country’s refugee review tribunal, says it would amount to human trafficking.

For four months now there have been reports about discussions between Australian and Cambodian officials. But Mr Abbott's government has kept the Cambodia plan shrouded in secrecy, as it has much of its work to “stop the boats”. Scott Morrison, the immigration minister, has only confirmed that negotiations were still happening this week.

Other reports suggest that Australia wants Cambodia to take about 1,000 of the asylum-seekers it has detained in a camp on Nauru, a tiny Pacific-island state. Nauru had agreed only to process boat people who Australia sends there, not to resettle them. Australia would pay Cambodia about 40m Australian dollars ($37m) in aid to take in its boat people on a permanent basis. (Australia has an arrangement to operate a separate camp for asylum-seekers on Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea. The boat people there who succeed in claiming refugee status are supposed to be resettled in PNG.)

The government’s choice of Cambodia for any new deal leaves many people dumbfounded. Australia’s wealth and political stability make for an awful contrast with Cambodia’s poverty and corruption. Australia might not be able to guarantee the safety of any asylum-seekers who were transferred to Cambodia. Paul Power, head of an NGO called the Refugee Council of Australia, is worried about Cambodia’s “history of human-rights violations and its track record of expelling refugees back to danger”. He has in mind Cambodia’s practice of returning Montagnard refugees to Vietnam, and Uighur asylum-seekers to China; in both cases, the ethnic minorities have faced persecution in the countries they had fled.

Phil Robertson, of Human Rights Watch, goes further. He calls the proposed plan with Cambodia a “refugee-dumping deal”, in which Australia would be trying to OUTSOURCEits obligations under the UN refugee convention. Mr Robertson argues that Mr Abbott and his government “should be universally condemned for his central role in trashing the principle of refugee protection in the region”.

Mr Morrison seems unmoved. He says a deal would "build the capability for people to be responsibly resettled in Cambodia”. Mr Morrison prides himself on having delivered on Mr Abbott's “stop the boats” promise. The government has used the navy to push vessels back to Indonesia, where most of them embark for Australian territory. It recently marked six months without any such boats having reached Australia. One contingent of 157 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers, who had left from India, almost made it in late June, but Australian authorities intercepted their craft and diverted them to Nauru.

The government justifies its policy in the name of deterring would-be refugees from making dangerous boat journeys. Some see a more populist angle: it plays well with some segments of Australian society to be seen taking a tough line on unauthorised immigrants.

As far as public theatre is concerned, Mr Morrison’s announcement on the child detainees is a safe one. All the children involved in Mr Morrison’s planned release are younger than 10 years old, and already living on the Australian mainland. He has referred to 1,547 children as living in “community detention”; about 150 more are being held in detention centres. The whole group is to be released into the wider community on temporary VISAS, along with their families.

Almost 500 more children are being held on Nauru and in another detention centre on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. They are to remain locked up while their refugee claims drag on. Mr Morrison argued that keeping people in offshore centres is “what’s stopping the children coming on the boats”.

Australia’s human-rights COMMISSION is holding an inquiry into asylum-seeking children being held in detention centres. Mr Morrison is due to give evidence on August 22nd. Gillian Triggs, the commission’s head, recently returned from a visit to Christmas Island, andspoke scathingly about the impact of incarceration on the mental health of children there. She wants all children released, whatever their age and location; she says Mr Morrison’s announcement, goes only "some way" on this.