Calls for the urgent release of people seeking asylum, refugees and other non-citizens held in immigration detention centres began as soon as the magnitude and reach of the global health crisis associated with COVID-19 became clear. Public health organisations quickly identified detention centres, as sites of mandatory and often overcrowded social confinement, as extremely high risk places for both infection and onward transmission of COVID-19. In Australia, before the end of March 2020, over 1180 health care professionals and epidemiologists called for the Government to release people from immigration detention, flatly stating that, '[f]ailure to take action to release people seeking asylum and refugees from detention will. .. put them at greater risk of infection (and possibly death)' (SBS News, 2020). Similar statements were made by the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases, the Australian College of Infection Prevention and Control (Davis and Russo, 2020) and over 1100 Australian and international academics in an open letter to the Australian Government initiated by Academics for Refugees (Academics for Refugees, 2020). Common to all expert advice were warnings that a failure to take action would not only endanger the health and lives of those in detention, but would inevitably put the broader community at risk, since detention centres are porous locations with staff and other personnel frequently moving in and out of them.

This article provides the first history and critique of Australia’s private refugee sponsorship program, the Community Support Program (CSP). As more countries turn to community sponsorship of refugees as a means to fill the “resettlement gap,” Australia’s model provides a cautionary tale. The CSP, introduced in 2017, does not expand Australia’s overall resettlement commitment but instead takes places from within the existing humanitarian resettlement program. The Australian program charges sponsors exorbitant application fees, while simultaneously prioritizing refugees who are “job ready,” with English-language skills and ability to integrate quickly, undermining the principle of resettling the most vulnerable. As such, we argue that the CSP hijacks places from within Australia’s humanitarian program and represents a market-driven outsourcing and privatization of Australia’s refugee resettlement priorities and commitments.

This article critically examines techniques employed by the Australian state to expand its control of refugees and asylum seekers living in Australia. In particular, it analyses the operation of Australia’s unique Asylum Seeker Code of Behaviour, which asylum seekers who arrive by boat must sign in order to be released from mandatory immigration detention, with reference to an original dataset of allegations made under the Code. We argue that the Code and the regime of visa cancellation and re-detention powers of which it forms a part are manifestations of what Beckett and Murakawa call the ‘shadow carceral state’, whereby punitive state power is extended beyond prison walls through the blurring of civil, administrative and criminal legal authority. The Code contributes to Australia’s apparatus of refugee deterrence by adding to it a brutal system of surveillance, visa cancellation and denial of services for asylum seekers living in the community.

Affairs n.d. Note, the conservative Liberal Government uses the terminology of 'illegal maritime arrival' as a matter of policy even though the statutory language is 'unauthorised maritime arrival' as described above. The rhetoric of illegality is of course contested, and is used to criminalise those entering without a valid immigration status. based on their commission, or suspected commission, of a crime. 67 It also criticised the manner in which section 116(g) and accompanying regulations reverse the presumption of innocence for bridging visaholders, who may be detained if charged with rather than found guilty of a crime. In appraising the data below, this fundamental aspect of the bridging visa regime and its ousting of one of the criminal law's most basic protections, must frame crimmigration analyses of visa cancellations under the Act.The other key component of bridging visa cancellation powers for asylum seekers is the Asylum Seeker Code of Behaviour, introduced by the Liberal-National Coalition Government in December 2013. The Code, which enlarges the already vast discretions relating to bridging visa cancellation, applies to all so-called 'unauthorised maritime arrivals' (UMA) who apply for or seek to renew a bridging visa. 68 In order to access a bridging visa, this group of asylum seekers must sign the Code, and are thereafter bound by a 'list of expectations' about how to behave at all times while in Australia -expectations which range from obeying the law to refraining from spreading rumours, spitting or swearing in public, engaging in 'disruptive activities' or persistently irritating anyone. Signing and adhering to the Code is a precondition for an UMA either to be released from detention or to remain in the community.Data released by the Department sets out that, as at June 2016, 57,430 BVEs had been granted to asylum seekers who had signed the Code, which includes 54,235 BVE renewals. As I have noted with Methven elsewhere, in its first years of implementation there was very limited use or enforcement of the Code, even as it had an immense impact on the BVE holders subject to its vast and undefined prohibitions. The Department did not report on the number of cancellations in the Code's first year. 69 In 2015-16 the Department reported that 281 BVE holders had been alleged to breach the Code, but that no cancellations were made. 70 Often when the criminalisation of asylum seekers is discussed in Australia, this is a reference to the criminalisation of 'unlawful' or 'unauthorised' arrival; that is, the criminalisation of immigration status or immigration breaches. As Gerard and Pickering explain, 'construction of refugees and migrants as "criminal" makes the application of criminal justice responses to irregular migration seem appropriate'. 71 Refugees who arrive unlawfully are not only made 'illegal' but they are illegals; and, like 'domestic' law breakers, they are constructed as dangerous, undeserving and deviant. 72 While refugees and asylum seekers have been classified as illegal, the...

In refugee applications involving witchcraft‐related violence (WRV), those accused of witchcraft are largely women, and those fearing witchcraft are more often men. This is one of two interrelated articles reporting on cases where claimants feared harm from witchcraft or occult practices. It argues that WRV is a manifestation of gender‐related harm, one which exposes major failings in the application of refugee jurisprudence. Systemic inattention to the meaning and application of the Convention ground of religion, combined with gender insensitivity in analysis, meant that claims were frequently reconfigured by decision makers as personal grudges. The fear of witchcraft cases pose an acute ontological challenge to refugee status determination, as the claimed harm falls outside what is understood to be objective, verifiable, or Convention‐related. Male applicants struggled to make their claims comprehensible as a result of the feminized and ‘irrational’ characterization of witchcraft fears and beliefs.