SYDNEY, 06 DECEMBER 2019 (NEW YORK TIMES) — The Australian Parliament on Wednesday repealed a law that had allowed refugees and asylum seekers being held offshore to seek emergency medical care in Australia, a reversal that human rights advocates denounced as cruel and shameful.
The vote, which came 10 months after the law was enacted, was the latest example of the Australian government’s hard-line stance on border protection, a policy it has maintained even as the United Nations has condemned it for detaining asylum seekers who were intercepted at sea indefinitely, on islands in the Pacific.
“This was always a law that was about getting people here through the back door, and today we’ve closed that back door,” Peter Dutton, the minister for home affairs, told reporters in Canberra, the capital. He added that it had undermined efforts to resettle refugees in the United States under a deal struck in 2016.
The independent senator who cast the decisive vote to repeal the measure, Jacqui Lambie, said it would return decision-making power to lawmakers from doctors, whose approval was required for a medical transfer.
The law, which was narrowly approved in February after a campaign by doctors, lawyers and rights advocates, allowed detainees on the islands to come to Australia for medical treatment or assessment if the transfers were approved by two doctors and the home affairs minister.
About 170 people have filed applications to be transferred under the law, and more than 130 have been evacuated. About 500 are still being held in the Pacific island nations of Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Since the Australian government enacted a policy in 2013 barring anyone intercepted at sea from setting foot in Australia, more than 3,000 people have been held on the islands, where their living conditions have been described as dire.
Twelve detainees have died since 2014. A coroner said in 2018 that a faster medical transfer could have prevented the death of Hamid Khazaei, an Iranian asylum seeker who suffered from a leg infection. There have been no deaths since the medical evacuation law was enacted.
Dissenting lawmakers said the law’s repeal would compound the detainees’ despair. “The last shred of hope for people we know were suffering in those offshore hellholes was knowing they were getting medical care — and now that’s gone,” said Richard Di Natale, the leader of the Greens party.
Detainees called the move a devastating blow. Shamindan Kanapathi, a Sri Lankan detainee in Papua New Guinea, said on Twitter that refugees’ lives would “again be in the hands of politicians who have shown they will deliberately withhold medical treatment from people who desperately need it.
