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Interview with Dr Phil Glendenning, of the Edmund Rice Centre, Sydney Australia. Wed 12th November

Phil Glendenning is the kind of trail blazing human rights activist that most of us would be well accustomed to reading about only in the likes of a fantastically worked out character from a John le Carré novel. One week before the television screening of A Well Founded Fear (AWFF) I had the opportunity to see the stories of 6 deported asylum seekers to Iran, Turkey, Syria and Afghanistan through Phil’s journey as he sought to track down applicants who had failed to make sanctuary in Australia. Mohammed, one of the failed applicants Phil located, went missing during filming and has recently come to light that he was tortured and brutally killed in the Gazni province in September 2008.

Daly: What was it that led you to making this film? Where did it all begin?
Glendenning: Well we were at a Christmas party in June 2001/2002, and there was a well known journalist, a lawyer and a magnificent 80 year old nun, and a number of refugee advocates who had bits of this story. Australia had been deporting people to danger, refouling people –which is against international law and against our own domestic law –but nobody had the evidence of the evidence. And we thought if we could actually find out what happened and prove that this was occurring it would be something that the government would seriously have to answer for. And quite naively we thought it could be a bombshell, and quite possibly bring the government down. So we looked into the fact that no one else did it, and we determined at that point to do something about it. We’ve now visited over 150 people in 22 countries.

The title of A Well Founded Fear comes from the inserts to rejection letters that asylum seekers receive on a daily basis, as shown in your film..
Refugee status is based on the 1951 Refugee Convention which in it has that you have to prove that you have a well founded fear of persecution based on grounds of your religion, ethnicity, race or political views. Therefore, AWFF basically asserts that these people were refuges and shouldn’t have been refouled. The point there, is that unless and until we were able to determine what happens to those we rejected, we won’t know if we are correctly identifying refugees or not, and no monitoring of that has ever occurred. The then head of the Human Rights Commission in 2000 put in a submission to the Australian Senate saying that someone had to do this job –and if you put together those two bits of information together: the fact that people had bits of the story, and there was the call for someone to do it –we decided to do it.

It is a grey area, that there is no international guarantee for asylum seekers
Except that governments –the Australian and British governments –are signatories to the Refugee Convention, which means that people need to have their cases assessed and assessed fairly. Now what we did is, particularly in Australia, is post the arrival of the Tempa, where people then did not have normal access to the norms of Australian law. And so consequently there is no right of appeal, consequently the systems for their cases to be processed and heard were entirely inadequate. You had the example of Afghan Hizara people being interviewed by Pashtung speakers from the very tribe that they were trying to escape from - it would be like asking someone who was a survivor of the European deathcamps to come and have their case for asylum assessed by a Nazi interpreter! That’s an extreme example, but in the minds of those people that’s precisely what they were being done to them. They were being asked to confide in someone that they were seeking to escape from. And when the decision was made on their case –whether they would stay or go –there was no right of appeal, no right to a lawyer, no right to correct information, and consequently serious mistakes were made. And when you make mistakes like this, people die. And that’s what happened.

Sometimes these debates tend to be removed of ‘the human face’ and elevated into balancing acts of the community v individual v security circumstances. Your film, however, comes at this from the opposite end of the debate, from the side less seen by policymakers
One of the reasons why we made this was to show the human face –to show these people talking, where in Australia they used to have a number, where they were a nameless, faceless illegal asylum seeker –imagine that calling something illegal when seeking asylum is a perfectly legal thing to do! –but part of what the government did was to keep them away in detention centres, out on Nauru [get link for this] where people never saw their names or faces. And so it’s easy therefore to justify that you would treat people escaping from the Taliban as if they were the Taliban, people escaping Saddam Hussein as if they were Saddam Hussein

As if those regimes would afford these people the correct documentation to assist them in filing for asylum elsewhere
Exactly – that would never happen. And so one of the tasks of the film was to put a name to a face and a face to a name, and to see the names of their children, and to see the better men and women who loved other people and who were loved by people, and that terrible mistakes were made with their lives. Unless Australia is prepared to take responsibility for those actions we are not able to sit down at the table of civilised nations and look at each other in the eye. We have a lot of ground to make up.

As you mentioned, there are the Pacific island detention centres that were used to much success by the Howard Administration up until early this year, which have been rolled back since July by Prime Minister Rudd who has been introducing a new way of handling asylum seeking issues
The new government have managed to end the Pacific Solution –imagine that –calling something the Pacific Solution …people in Europe are very familiar with that that language which has been used before –it was an appalling thing to do!

So the Rudd government and Mr Evans have done a great job in ending and closing the Nauru detention center, but they have only done half the job. This means that future asylum seekers won’t end up there, but the Pacific Solution has not ended for people that are still victims of it –those people that we met in the film, these people in Afghanistan –far too many that we could not include in this movie. They remain the victims of this, because once you leave a country to seek asylum, once you come back –particularly in a society with a strong oral tradition and the networks of tribal rivalries are so sever and pronounced –they are exposed to increased risk. So they went back to a situation where the risk they faced was greater than the risk they ran away from because of the intervention of Australia.

One example from your film would be Azim, who was a political political opposed to the pro-Soviet Afghani government, whose asylum application in Australia was eventually rejected
Azim’s application was initially accepted, but it was changed after the Tampere boat came along. But Azim had also walked away from and rejected his Islamic faith and he got marriage across tribal lines –so he had a number of things that made him a risk. Unsurprisingly, when he retuned, within four months a bomb was thrown at his house and both of his daughters were killed –his 9 year old Yalda and his 6 year old daughter Rowna. Now, we can’t have that: there is unfinished business. There is no legal responsibility, but there is certainly a moral responsibility to put the wrong that was committed to other human beings, right. Otherwise, what do human rights mean? What does our respect for international human rights laws and covenants mean? At some point you’ve got to take human rights seriously.

This raises questions on the validity of international treaties, and whether they are worth the paper they are signed on unless they can be backed up –that they are taken seriously and they are supported and backed up by legal protection mechanisms. Certainly, countries that have a democratic tradition of respect for human rights would need to consider having a bill of rights. The Westminster system adopted in Australia, like the United Kingdom, has shown a reluctance to legislate a human rights act [*the UK Human Rights Act 1998 only came into force on 2nd October 2000, nearly 50 years after the European Convention on Human Rights was opened for signatures], as successive governments have claimed confidence in the substantive protections that were already in existence without the need for a BoRs
Well I think the Howard government saw it as being able to use fear as device to getting elected. Azim said to me at one point, ‘we got caught up in politics and my children died so that John Howard could win an election’. That’s what happened: the Howard government paid no attention to the human rights of these peoples and scant regard to the covenants and treaties that we had signed. If we had a bill of rights that enshrined in domestic law the rights of people to habeas corpus, the rights of people to representation and to normal judicial processes then you would have found protections in place that would have prevented this from happening. But because those protections didn’t exist, this happened.

From a comparative perspective, the UK’s asylum seeking regime has undergone a kick-back from the human rights language, firstly through the ECtHR and then in the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998
European countries use ‘complementary protections’, for example if you are caught up in a domestic dispute, or say, a civil war or even a family dispute that was life threatening, they may not be covered under the Refugee Convention but they would be covered under various complementary protection regimes. Now, we don’t have that. The new Rudd government are said to install this for the very first time, and we welcome that very much.

But you have to come back to the point: what was people’s intent? Australia is a nation that is made up of migrants, refugees and indigenous people. Unless you are black Australian, you or your ancestors have come from somewhere else. In lots of ways the Howard government was saying that you should be scared of these people. I mean, we’re used to immigration, we’re used to refugees: some of our most famous sports people were refugees. And we know that some of the young Afghans that are settling down in Australia will be representing our country at the Olympics with ten years and will be up to bowl [cricket] for the Australian side and playing full-back for the Wallabies: because that’s what happens, that’s what happens with history. We had the wave of east-Europeans during the post-war period, we had Vietnamese migrants after the Vietnam war, we’ve had Arab and African refugees from various conflicts –but we tend to give a very hard time to those that are just the last arrivals.

There are two groups of people that we target: those who were the first peoples, the aboriginal people, and those who were last to arrive. And in lots of ways, what the Howard government did was to hold up a mirror to us and say, ‘be scared of yourselves’. Instead of trying to pull together the best aspirations of people, they played a very different stance and used the situations of some of the worlds most vulnerable people as a means for electoral success. The Howard policy of detention centres, of settlements and camps were shown to be an abject failure, appallingly expensive and that they didn’t work. So any country that would contemplate repeating this is making the simple mistake that the evidence doesn’t support the political view.

On reflection Phil, the impact of your film is going to have a wide impact across the pond to other countries. I am thinking about the people that the UK and Ireland would turn around and send back home, and the function that this film would have on raising public awareness about these issues that is not trapped in the echelons of a faceless public policy discourse
Australian people need to know, so that cant say ‘well we didn’t know about this’. And, at the end of the day, Sting was right when he wrote that song ‘the Russians love their children too’ –well so did the Afghanis, so did the Iraqis, so did the Iranians. These people sought shelter, and when they came to Australia they received the opposite of that, and we lost some of our humanity in what we did. If we are ever to get it back we have to take responsibility for what we have done.

In terms of cultural impact to many foreign students, Australia represents the last frontier of vastness and a discovery into the unknown, both physically (because it’s at the other side of the planet) and existentially (in self-discovery). Your film turns this experience around, and argues that you can not just blindly equate travel and distance with tourism and pleasure, in light of the other tavellers and the reasons for their journeys
The most important thing is to get access to the truth. What this film tries to say, in the words of Robert Kennedy, is that:

It is futile for earth-bound humanity to cling to the dark and poisoning superstition that our world is bounded by the nearest hill, his universe ends of the river’s shore, his common humanity is enclosed in the tight circle of those that share his town, or his views and the colour of his skin. And it is your job, the task of the young people of this world, to strip the last remnants of that cruel ancient belief from the civilization of humankind.

So you see, it’s not just a question of what you are going to do, it’s also a question of who you are going to be. Have a great time, enjoy yourself. But for goodness sake: find out the truth.