The Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) has condemned the return of 18 Tamils to Sri Lanka on Saturday morning and called on the government to disclose the exact conditions in which they were returned.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government has billed the returns as voluntary,\u201d said Ian Rintoul, speaking on behalf of RAC. \u201cBut there is good reason to doubt the government\u2019s claim. The asylum seekers have had no independent legal advice, access to refugee supporters, or the Tamil community.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of the people have only just arrived here after a traumatic ocean crossing, fleeing degenerating conditions in Sri Lanka. People who\u2019ve just fled for their lives aren\u2019t in the best state to make informed decisions about their welfare. This is more like coercion than informed consent. The public needs to know just what the Tamils were told about the circumstances of their return. What exactly were they told? \u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is ample documentation of asylum seekers being tortured on return to Sri Lanka,\u201d Rintoul continued. \u201cA report by the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> in July uncovered \u2018systematic state-sanctioned abuse\u2019 by the Rajapaksa regime. This adds to the mass of documentation of human rights abuses in the country, including torture, rape, intimidation and abduction. The United Nations Committee against torture has urged Australia in the past not to deport Tamils to Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n \u201cIndependent reports by the BBC, The Independent<\/em> newspaper in the UK, and by organizations like Human Rights Watch, Freedom from Torture and the Catholic Church leave no doubt that Sri Lanka remains a murderous environment for opponents of the government. This is a country where 146,000 people remain unaccounted for.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact is that there are still almost 2000 Sri Lankans in the Australian immigration system\u201d, Rintoul added. \u201cThe vast majority of them will be found to be refugees. The role of the Sri Lankan government in persecuting the Tamil opposition couldn\u2019t be clearer. The Sri Lankan government has refused to systematically investigate either war crimes, or the abductions of political opponents. The BBC reported in March that government soldiers were caught red-handed in a foiled abduction attempt.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBy returning asylum seekers to Sri Lanka, the Australian government is complicit in these human rights abuses.<\/p>\n \u201cThese returns highlights one of our most serious concerns about off-shore processing. How much pressure is being applied to Tamils already on Nauru to \u201cvoluntarily\u201d return home? Under the Howard government, hundreds of Afghans on Nauru were coerced into \u201cvoluntarily returning to Afghanistan \u2013 some to their death.\u201d<\/p>\n For more information contact Ian Rintoul 0417 275 713, or Nick Reimer 0435 533 027<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) has condemned the return of 18 Tamils to Sri Lanka on Saturday morning and called on the government to disclose the exact conditions in which they were returned. \u201cThe government has billed the returns as voluntary,\u201d said Ian Rintoul, speaking on behalf of RAC. \u201cBut there is good reason to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[12],"class_list":{"0":"post-1999","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-press-releases","7":"tag-nauru"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refugeeaction.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refugeeaction.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refugeeaction.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refugeeaction.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/311091"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refugeeaction.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/refugeeaction.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refugeeaction.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refugeeaction.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refugeeaction.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}