Australia’s promise to settle 12,000 refugees fleeing Syria and Iraq appears “hollow”, six of Australia’s leading humanitarian organisations have said, with just 3,500 arrivals since then prime minister Tony Abbott promised the new intake a year ago.
World Vision, Oxfam, Save the Children, Plan International, Care and Amnesty International have condemned Australia’s dilatory response to the Syrian crisis as “incomprehensible”, and called on the government to resettle all the promised 12,000 by the end of March 2017.
Friday marks one year since Abbott committed Australia to resettling 12,000 refugee from the Syrian and Iraq conflict, saying “our officials will work with the UNHCR to resettle the refugees as soon as possible”.
The US and Canada have resettled more than 10,000 and 30,000 respectively. Canada’s government runs a website, tagged #Welcome Refugees, which gives progress updates.
After a slow start to the program – as recently as August 13 just 1,876 refugees had come to Australia – the pace of resettlement has dramatically increased in the past month.
Late on Thursday, the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, issued a statement saying more than half of the 12,000 visas promised – 6,678 – had been granted, and 3,532 of those visa holders had come to Australia under the program.
Another 6,000 people were in the process of being interviewed, screened and vetted.
Dutton said it was vital that identity, health, character, and security checks were carried out before the granting of a visa.
“The government’s prime responsibility is to protect the Australian community and Australians would understand that these checks must be carried out in the current global security environment.
“As a government we made it clear at the outset this special intake would take time to fulfil, that processing would be thorough, that there would be no shortcuts,” Dutton said.
Australian immigration department sources earlier told the Guardian there has been a recent rise in refugee processing, but that the process remains mired in bureaucratic delays, mainly around identity and security checks.
The World Vision Australia chief executive Tim Costello said it was incomprehensible Australia had been able to resettle only a fraction of the special intake.
“When Tony Abbott promised to take 12,000 more refugees, he said it would reflect ‘Australia’s proud history as a country with a generous heart’,” Costello said. “But there is a point at which a promise begins to look hollow when it is not honoured, and Australia has reached that point.”
The conflict across Syria and Iraq is producing the largest number of forcibly displaced in the world at present. Nearly 12 million Syrians are either internally displaced, asylum seekers, or refugees. Neighbouring countries Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon are hosting the vast majority of those forced out by the five-year-old internecine conflict.
The Plan International Australia chief executive officer Ian Wishart said the world was in the middle of one of the largest refugee crises in living memory.
“In Syria, half the pre-conflict population of 22 million Syrians have fled their homes in the past five years and more than 13.5 million people are in need of help. Australia needs to shoulder its fair share of the global responsibility for refugees.”
Eighty-six percent of the world’s refugees are hosted by developing countries, usually near to their country of origin. The chief executive of Oxfam Australia, Helen Szoke, said Australia’s efforts lagged well behind even those of other wealthy nations.
“Canada completed security checks and settled 25,000 people in just four months. We know millions of ordinary men, women and children have been forced to flee their homes in a desperate search for protection and are in dire need of assistance. We urgently need to help as many as we can,” said Szoke.
Abbott announced the additional 12,000 resettlement places on 9 September 2015, saying Australia’s was a “generous, prudent and proportionate response by a decent and compassionate nation”.
Abbott said the refugees would be selected from those “most in need” and all would undergo normal security, health and character checks before being resettled in Australia and offered permanent protection.
The 12,000 would be in addition to Australia’s annual humanitarian intake of 13,750. No timeframe was put on the resettlement.
A senior department source told the Guardian last week the figure was “starting to pick up but it’s still only about 2,000”. The majority of that figure are understood to have arrived in the past six weeks.
The immigration minister and his department both declined to answer questions. However, the NSW coordinator general for refugee resettlement, Peter Shergold, told the Guardian in a recent interview: “We’re working on basis that most of those 12,000 will arrive this year. We expect 6,000 of those 12,000 to come to NSW.”
Criticism of Australia’s resettlement efforts means Australia approaches two major global fora on refugees with its hardline asylum policies under unprecedented international pressure.
In April, the Papua New Guinea supreme court ruled the Manus Island offshore detention centre was “illegal and unconstitutional”, a finding accepted by the PNG government which promised to shut the centre down.
And in August, the Guardian published the Nauru Files: more than 2,000 leaked incident reports from within the detention centre on that island that show systemic violence and sexual abuse, including by guards; catastrophic rates of mental illness; regular downgrading and manipulating of reports; and almost daily instances of self-harm and suicide attempts.
On 19 September, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, will host a summit in New York “addressing large movements of refugees and migrants”. A draft declaration document from the summit has already been widely circulated – and widely condemned – for its failure to commit countries to concrete actions to make refugees’ journeys better or safer.
The day after Ban’s summit, the US president, Barack Obama, will host his own “leaders’ summit”, also in New York.
But, unlike the UN event, the US summit has been billed as a “pay-to-play” summit, with Obama offering invitations only to countries who indicate in advance they are prepared to make concrete commitments to accept more refugees.
The Guardian understands Australia has been invited but has not yet formally accepted.
A further commitment to resettle more refugees from Middle East conflict zones has been mooted as a possible commitment from Australia, but it is understood a final decision has not been made.
