On the Ethics of Repatriation of Failed Iranian Asylum Seekers

Or: why Julie really needs to lay off the crack pipe

Yesterday Julia Bishop played host to what may well end up being one of the most fatal foreign policy errors of the Turnbull government. The Iranian Foreign Minister Dr Mohammad Javad Zarif has announced while visiting Canberra that Iran will take back failed asylum seekers “with pride,” and, like an oblivious puppy with a battery acid addiction, Bishop proceeded to see exactly nothing wrong with this.

First of all, the fact that we have any kind of diplomatic relationship with Iran is a mystery to me. As one of the world’s foremost producers of human rights violations, they should be firmly on the Naughty List of every self-respecting progressive country in the developed world. Sadly, I’m not sure which part of that equation Australia fails to meet. My depressive outlook on the collective Australian political conscience was only reinforced by a retrospectively unwise waltz through a relevant Facebook comments section. Some select gems for your perusal (and to exercise your gag reflex):

• GOOD. The less freeloaders the better !!
• Just send them back in a boat and see how they like it hahahah
• be a lot easier to give our navy something t do with the 50 cals
• Quick put them all on a boat and set sail
• Sail to iran waters n throw them in the water
• Bring back the white Australia policy
• BYE BYE…financial country shopping migrants…Thank you Iran, a very safe country as long as you abide by their laws…and why wouldn’t you want to respect your countries laws, wish more could be done here in that regard…
• Vote 1 Trump

And my personal favourite example of human civility:

• In other words they’d execute them. Let’s make this deal happen.

Let’s just think about that for a moment: there are a not insignificant number people in our country who genuinely enjoy the thought of needless suffering. There are people who believe that others should be deprived of dignity or killed for wanting to escape a shitty situation to an extent that reflects genuinely terrifying bloodlust. It is the essence of irony that these people would be quite comfortable in the theocratic state. The Iranian government enforces a narrow-minded and aggressive interpretation of their religion, and hate dissidents, women, and homosexuals. They need only add an official policy of climate change denialism and they’ve hit conservative bingo.

But once again I find myself rushing off down Tangent Highway. The point is that our foreign minister gladly stood beside the representative of a nation whose human rights record would make Mugabe blush, smiling as they came to an agreement that repatriation of Iranian asylum seekers can be feasible and sustainable.

Make no mistake, if the government fuck this up — and sheer statistical brute force suggests they will — people will die. Any repatriation agreement rests on the assumptions that the denial of the asylum seeker’s claim was accurate, and that country of origin is a genuinely benevolent actor. If we received an asylum seeker from Iceland, for example, this would be easy. Iceland has an impeccable human rights record and, assuming the asylum seeker didn’t have some genuine esoteric claim of asylum based on oppression of Viking minorities, we could all sit around a table with Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson and sort out the situation over a pot of skyr and fermented shark. This clearly can’t be said for Iran, and it has nothing to do with Nordic yoghurt.

First of all, even Sweden is no stranger to messing up asylum claims. One case saw an atheist man of Egyptian origin denied asylum in Sweden. This was not because atheists aren’t a persecuted group in Egypt, but because the migration board weren’t convinced of his atheism. The guy, who had been living in Sweden for 18 months at that point, had a job in computer science, appeared to be functioning quite well as a member of Swedish society, and speaks English with a Swedish accent. If this can happen in what is virtually the most open country in the world with respect to refugee policy, with what frequency do such miscarriages of justice occur in a country which routinely disregards international law in the name of political expediency?

And then there’s the Iran side of the equation. How should we expect that these people are treated on their return to such a country? Iran just renewed their fatwa against Salman Rushdie, like a violently psychopathic old couple trying to keep the flame alive. They prescribe the death penalty for homosexuals, they hang Baha’is for “apostasy,” and God only knows what happens to atheists who dare publicly articulate their beliefs. They imprison journalists for the hell of it, and rape, torture, and kill protesters. This is a country which has a pretty clear (but firmly denied) record of killing kids, and they do it all under the absurd defence of not following the “Western interpretation of human rights.” Given their abysmal history of moral paucity, I hold the reasonable suspicion that on their return to Iran, rejected asylum seekers will either (a) be publicly executed for treason or blasphemy or mofsede-fel-arz or whatever other bullshit excuse the regime can come up with, or (b) fall off the radar and never be heard from again.

The menace of the phrasing itself — that Iran will take back people who fled the country “with pride” — should be enough of a fifty-foot high prophetic skull-shaped smoke signal to arouse the suspicions of the government. But naturally the only person making sense on the issue is Tanya Plibersek, who basically said “holy shit guys we better be damn sure of what we’re doing here.”

But even if you accept the bizarre premise that Iran is a safe country to live in, it’s not enough to simply say “okay Iran is safe now, we can send the asylum seekers back.” If we’re going to do this (and it looks like we are because democratic principles and open debate are classical mythology to our government), we need to be following these people up. It is our ethical responsibility as a receiver of people seeking asylum to make sure that those people are safe wherever we end up putting them. There aren’t many worse crimes than taking someone into your care and then exposing them to the same abuses that landed them in your care in the first place. This means we have to monitor Iranian (ex-)asylum seekers from the moment they land in Iran and check in with them regularly for years after they leave Australia. It is simply unethical to return the responsibility of the welfare of any individual to the person who abused them in the first place. There’s no way we’d give an abused child back to the father who molested him simply because he says he is “safe” despite abundance evidence to the contrary. This is just the international equivalent. It is completely impractical, of course, to think that we could set aside sufficient resources to monitor the wellbeing of individuals from the other side of the world. But in order to maintain ethically neutral ground, this is what our government would have to do. Again, lives are at stake here.

It seems to me that there aren’t many people in Iran who don’t have an ostensibly legitimate claim to asylum. Women can be (and are regularly) lashed or thrown in jail for not wearing a hijab properly (and that’s if they survive the acid attacks), so I’d certainly think that qualifies as grounds to seek asylum. And we should also be throwing our doors open to the presumably sizeable chunk of Iranians whose sexual or gender identity contradicts the laws of the land, or who have the audacity to follow a heretic religion (or none at all). By now we are certainly talking about most of the Iranian population, given the immense popularity of Facebook pages in the vein of My Stealthy Freedom.

That said, I get the need for repatriation of people whose claims to asylum aren’t sound. It is a real issue and needs a real solution so that more “genuine” refugees can be accepted. Combine that puzzle with the fact that clearly a progressive attitude to people seeking asylum isn’t politically expedient, and you have the makings of a real political head-scratcher, and this might seem to be a reasonable solution. Clearly, it is not. There is so much work involved in keeping anyone safe in an Islamic theocracy (or a non-secular state of any kind) that it becomes absurd to think that we could hand over at-risk individuals to the Iranian government and then dust our hands while merrily singing “problem solved.” At the end of the day, it almost seems like this unprecedented cooperation with a volatile state is the move of a government desperately searching for patchwork solutions to a much larger issue. Maybe that’s just what we should have expected.