ABSTRACT
In 2018–19 three Rwandan refugees, formerly members of the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda and part of a large group that was responsible for the murder of western tourists in Uganda in 1999, were granted visas to enter to Australia. This occurred many years after a failed prosecution in the United States for their alleged involvement in the murders of two American tourists – the criminal trial collapsed on evidential grounds. Deemed undesirable by U.S. authorities and unworthy of asylum due to their past associations and alleged activities, but unreturnable due to the prospective risk of persecution at the hands of Rwandan authorities, the men were left in detention pending a third-country solution. Their smooth passage to Australia ensued in the aftermath of an acrimonious telephone exchange between President Trump and Prime Minister Turnbull about immigration policies in February 2017. Trump expressed his contempt for the secret asylum agreement his presidential predecessor had entered into to resettle up to 1,250 refugee-prisoners who had been contained on Nauru and Manus Island for several years – pursuant to Australia’s punitive offshore processing regime for ‘irregular’ migrants. For its part, Australia quietly agreed to accept the three Rwandan refugees administratively detained in the United States.
This chapter uses the controversial admittance of the Rwandan refugees into Australia as the catalyst for exploring and critically analysing relevant aspects of Australia’s web of ‘crimmigration’ laws and related administrative practices. This chapter interrogates whether and how the entry of the Rwandan refugees is consistent with domestic migration law, policy and practice that facilitates the exclusion of refugee claimants pursuant to Article 1F principles drawn from the Refugees Convention, national security laws and the ‘character test’.
