Ending the cruel separation of refugee families
KEY PROJECT | Migration Justice
Australia’s migration laws should aim to reunite people with their loved ones, not deliberately keep them apart. The Human Rights Law Centre advocates for an end to cruel migration policies that intentionally separate families.
Australia’s migration laws should aim to reunite people with their loved ones, not deliberately keep them apart. But through punitive and discriminatory policies, exorbitant costs to families, limited places and unreasonable delays, successive governments have deliberately kept thousands of families apart. For refugee families in particular, family separation is used as a tool to punish and deter people from seeking safety in Australia.
For several years the Human Rights Law Centre has been fighting these cruel tactics in the courts, on the international stage and through public advocacy.
Legal action
In 2022, the Human Rights Law Centre supported one family to challenge these delays in court. Our client Abdullah, who has permanent refugee protection in Australia, applied to be reunited with his wife Fatima and their children back in 2017. Fatima and the children had been living as refugees in Pakistan after a missile attack destroyed their home in Afghanistan, tragically killing one child and seriously injuring another.
For almost five years, the Australian government refused to process Abdullah and Fatima’s family visa application, so the Human Rights Law Centre supported the family to challenge the delay in court. Just weeks before the court hearing, the government conceded the case and granted the family’s visas. Fatima and the children have now been reunited with Abdullah in Australia and have begun rebuilding their lives together in safety.
We shared our learnings on this case with other legal and advocacy organisations to encourage other people to challenge these delays in court. We are hopeful that this will continue to apply pressure on the government. You can read more about their case here.
In 2023, we will conduct a series of Community Legal Education sessions in Springvale and Dandenong with our partners at South East Melbourne Legal Service. Through these sessions, we hope to identify other families in the same position as Abdullah's, and help those families to bring court proceedings to challenge the processing delays keeping them apart. By the end of the year, we hope to have commenced multiple court cases that illustrate to the government and public what it looks like to keep families apart for up to a decade - so that this policy is abolished once and for all.
Bringing the fight for families to Parliament
In December 2022, the Albanese government announced the repeal of Ministerial Direction 80, which deliberately assigned lowest priority to refugee families if their sponsor had arrived in Australia by sea and was later granted protection. While the repeal of this policy put an end to one facet of the official discrimination against certain refugee families, in practice families continue to contend with extraordinary processing delays and rigid and inflexible visa requirements.
We are engaging with the Albanese Government, through review processes and directly with politicians, calling for the reforms needed to reunite families. Our work to highlight the cruelty of family separation has resulted in the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs publicly acknowledging the issues plaguing the family migration system and committing to addressing the visa backlog.