sack vanstone: fake documents

The moral depravity of the Howard govt knows no limits....




Immigration accused of issuing fake documents to asylum seekers PRINT FRIENDLY EMAIL STORY
The World Today - Wednesday, 14 September , 2005 12:14:00
Reporter: Toni Hassan
ELEANOR HALL: Now to the allegations engulfing Australia's Immigration Department, that immigration officials have been issuing false travel documents.

The Director of the Edmund Rice Centre, Phil Glendenning, says that unnamed sources inside the Department have admitted to him that there are zealots in DIMIA (Department of Immigration and Multiculturalism and Indigenous Affairs) using unauthorised means of getting rid of long-term detainees.

The allegations of forged travel documents were raised yesterday by the Labor Party, which claimed the department had issued two asylum seekers with false identity papers in order to deport them to Serbia.

This report from Toni Hassan.

TONI HASSAN: The fresh allegations come from the head of the Sydney-based C at holic human rights agency, the Edmund Rice Centre.

Phil Glendenning, do you have reason to believe that what the Labor Party has put forward is true?

PHIL GLENDENNING: Yes I do, I do believe. We've had, since we've published our report in September 2004, and that was for the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), we've been approached with further examples of this information that people have been given travel identity documents but the information on the document is incorrect, or people who have been provided with travel documents through Africa that are provided by a private company that have ended up having Congolese people, for example, ending up in Mozambique and Angolans ending up in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

TONI HASSAN: Have you sought a confirmation of this practice from the department itself?

PHIL GLENDENNING: Yes, we have, we have, and the interesting thing is publicly the Government denies that this is happening, but privately the Department of Immigration have… are taking it very seriously and basically are not prepared to deny that it takes place.

TONI HASSAN: How much can you reveal about what sources have been saying from inside the department?

PHIL GLENDENNING: Well, I think it's fair to say that these… the information provided to us is that it didn't just happen by accident.

Clearly there are people within the Immigration Department who have been very, very concerned and have identified where these people have been sent and the methods used to move them.

And it's very clear that the practices and processes used at times by the Department of Immigration puts people greatly at risk because false information or false documents provided to individuals puts them at far greater risk when they arrive in another country.

And that is a tactic that is employed by people smugglers to provide false information to enable someone to pass quickly through the border of another country, and should not be a tactic that should be used by a sovereign government of a country like Australia.

TONI HASSAN: And presumably false documents, which you allege have been used, are being made using tax payer funds?

PHIL GLENDENNING: Yes, that's right. I mean, and also you've got to remember that for a long time DIMIA outsourced the movement of people through Africa to a private company, who provided people with documents to say that… to clarify their identity, and that's where we had Tanzanians being provided with documents to say that they were from Sudan.

We have a case of a gentleman who was sent… who ended up in jail in Darrasalam and eventually brought back to Australia because the documents he was provided with were false.

TONI HASSAN: The Edmund Rice Centre feels well equipped to comment on the Labor Party's suspicion that officers involved in Australia's immigration system have stooped to exploiting the tactics of people smugglers.

The Centre spent 18 months tracking down and interviewing 40 people deported by Australia in recent years. Most of the 40 rejected asylum seekers had been flown back to the M iddle E ast and Africa. Half of them had been given, the Centre found, false documents allegedly issued by DIMIA or issued with the blessing of the Immigration Department.

Yesterday Labor revealed that documents obtained under freedom of information laws show the Department of Immigration had last November requested new identities for an Albanian S erb couple whose asylum application had failed.

The lawyer representing the couple is Marion Le. She told the ABC's Radio National this morning that this is not an isolated case.

MARION LE: We've long been talking about the fact that the Australian Government have been using so-called Australian certificates or documents of identity to remove people whom they don't want in Australia, often leaving them stranded in countries overseas to which they don't belong either.

ELEANOR HALL: Immigration lawyer, Marion Le, speaking to Toni Hassan.