Do Human Rights Cut It? Christian Ethics and Refugee Politics

Original version written for and published on the SURRENDER blog on the 21st of December 2015.

Isn’t it just the most ridiculous thing, that objects are freer to move across borders than humans?

Increasingly in the West we have seen the Orwellian renaming of refugees as ‘economic migrants’, ‘illegal arrivals’ or even ‘potential terrorists’. We have seen traumatising images of the ‘European Migrant Crisis’, which again, is a renaming of what is actually the mass displacement of an entire nation of people, trying to live after their country has been torn apart by war. A war in which the West has blood-stained hands.

One way to explain the politicisation of migration is that in the context of globalisation and privatisation, governments hold less power. And so ‘sovereignty’ is invoked through border politics to bolster the perceived ability of governments to control.

The most prevalent justification for Australia’s offshore detention camps and other cruel policies is that it is to stop deaths at sea. This could be described as a utilitarian argument. Utilitarianism is about achieving the greatest level of happiness for everyone. With this logic, it is conceivable to cause harm to a group of people as long as it achieves the net good. The ends justify the means. Within this framework, detention camps are essentially places of human sacrifice. However, Australia’s deterrence policies simply mean people are not dying in our waters.

The most common critique of this logic is human rights logic. The assumption of human rights is that there are some means that are never justifiable by their ends because the lives and wellbeing of people should never be compromised by other people. That would be injustice, oppression.

But the call of the Gospel goes beyond the logic of human rights. Human rights do not actually require people to love one another, they merely require the absence of particular evils. The teachings of Jesus require love.

Noel Castellanos, in his blog post put up by SURRENDER last week explored Matthew 25; the ‘sheep and the goats’ passage in which Jesus says that to welcome the poor, the hungry, the naked, the stranger and the prisoner is to welcome God. This is an expression of God prioritising the poor. What is interesting here is that Jesus calls us not merely to re-humanise the other––we must deify them in the sense that we must love and tend to them as if we are loving and tending to God. This goes well beyond the human rights paradigm! In his blog post, Castellanos said ‘it is not one single verse but the entire revelation of Scripture that points us towards our responsibility to love the most vulnerable people in our society’.

It is important to remember that people are a product of their political, cultural and socio-economic environments. And that we as wealthy citizens of the West usually contribute to or are at least complicit in the reasons why ‘the least of these’ are ‘the least of these’ and we are not. The global ‘war on refugees’ is an example of this. We must first recognise the way we ourselves are capable of violence and participate in violent systems.

Forgive us, Lord.

It is on our behalf, supposedly, that our Government continues to scapegoat and persecute refugees.

We have a civic––and within the Church––a Christian duty as individuals to reject this notion. Not in our name. And as what is arguably still the most morally influential institution in Australia, the Church has an enormous capacity to bring about change.

During Christmas, we are reminded that God became a vulnerable refugee child. The Christmas story is about God breaking into the world and becoming ‘the least of these’. Jesus was born into such oppression that King Herod was able to order the slaughter of all firstborn babies in the land when he perceived a threat to his power.

And so, to welcome refugees is an act that cuts through the lights, noise, tinsel and Santa’s sack of consumerism to the lament, joy and struggle at the soul of the Christmas story.

2000 years later, the tragedy in the Christmas story is being re-enacted again and again. The political powers that be continue to ‘sacrifice’ children. The incarceration and abuse of children on Nauru is just one example.

This is why during Christmas, Love Makes A Way held a carols service outside the front doors of Transfield Services (now Broadspectrum), the corporation that holds the government contract for the (mis)management of Australia’s offshore detention centres on Manus and Nauru.

Over the last two years, Love Makes A Way has seen hundreds of Christian leaders engage in nonviolent direct action in every state and territory in Australia as personal expressions of their commitment to the love and Justice of Jesus Christ. We will continue to seek more humane asylum seeker policies through nonviolent love in action in 2016.

May we be blessed by the lament, joy and struggle of Christmas, and may it unsettle us enough to act in the New Year.