Refugees from Manus Island and Nauru are now being quietly resettled in Europe and Canada without any involvement from the Australian government.
As the resettlement deal with the US draws to a close, the UN’s refugee agency, a Canadian non-profit and an army of volunteers are mobilising to help the hundreds of people who are still stuck in limbo.
This extraordinary new chapter in offshore processing indicates that, based on the criteria on which others are intervening, these people are now judged to be among the most vulnerable refugees in the world.
The UNHCR’s involvement has not been publicly revealed before now and the agency declined to comment on the reason for its involvement.
Canada
Nearly 100 people have now reached the final stages of acceptance by Canada, under a unique private sponsorship program for refugees.
Barring any surprises, when Covid-19 travel restrictions lift they will eventually fly to North America where they will receive accommodation and other support for at least a year. Some will reunite with members of their immediate family they have not seen in years.
The engine behind their resettlement is Operation Not Forgotten, a project driven by collaboration between organisations and individual volunteers in Australia and Canada.
The non-profit Mosaic is one of the organisations the Canadian government allows to nominate a certain number of refugees to bring into the country every year, as long as it undertakes to help them settle in and prepares their refugee claims.
It is now reserving its entire allocation for refugees who were sent to Manus Island and Nauru.
“We saw the vulnerability and the suffering of the people who were in detention with no solution in sight,” says Mosaic’s Saleem Spindari.
If Australia had resettled these refugees, Mosaic’s spots would have gone elsewhere, according to it sponsorship coordinator, Iris Challoner. But these refugees “have suffered more than many others”.
While 11 people have already gone to Canada from Nauru and Papua New Guinea, mostly sponsored by individuals, Operation Not Forgotten means the resettlements can happen at scale.
If all goes well, Operation Not Forgotten could achieve hundreds of resettlements each year, all of them people who had no alternative. Mosaic has dedicated all of its 2020 spaces to this group and expects to have a further 200 spaces in 2021. (More than 400 refugees have registered their interest in the project.) To pull those applications together, it will rely on a network of more than 100 volunteers in Australia and Canada, collaborating with the Australian expat group Ads-Up Canada. The UNHCR assists with prioritising cases based on vulnerability. The Refugee Council of Australia has so far raised more than $2m for the project.
Europe
Another new source of hope for those held offshore is the intervention of the UN’s refugee agency. So far this year, France, Denmark and Norway have taken in a small number of refugees from Nauru and Papua New Guinea in resettlements brokered by the UNHCR.
The spots come from pools these countries reserve for cases deemed to be urgent or emergency priority – for the people UNHCR judges to be the most in need of resettlement worldwide. There are only a few places of this kind in the global quota.
These few places have been drawn upon to grant safety to people who remained Australia’s responsibility under international law.
Mohammad Shajahan is one of those. In mid-September he found himself on a direct flight from Nauru to Norway. Now he’s living in Bærum near Oslo, where he has already enrolled to study Norwegian. The 32-year-old, originally from Bangladesh, arrived on Christmas Island in 2013 and was transferred to Nauru in early 2014.
Shajahan is still coming to terms with his new reality. “Before, I can’t believe it … now I saw everything, now I believe,” he says.
He details a long list of medical concerns accumulated over the years in offshore processing. But Shajahan is now getting the care he needs. “I came to Norway and … they expect everything to be treated,” he says.
UNHCR’s publicly available database reveals that, as well as Shajahan, the refugee agency has resettled six men who were previously detained on Manus Island, mostly this year. Two men departed Port Moresby for Finland last week.
Given the small numbers, this pathway is unlikely to be a solution for many people.
Amnesty International’s Graham Thom says it’s “unfair” other countries have been called upon to “clear up” a problem that Australia could fix if it wanted to.
Although Thom applauded the generosity of the countries that have volunteered or agreed to resettle refugees from Manus Island and Nauru, he said those places were being used to fix a political problem of Australia’s own making.
“It’s just a horrible irony that places that should be going to particularly vulnerable refugees around the world, given the limits on resettlement at the moment and even in the best of times without Covid, are being taken up by people who should simply be granted protection in Australia,” he said.
UNHCR’s unusually direct intervention in Nauru and Papua New Guinea comes amid plummeting global resettlement numbers, worsened by delays caused by Covid-19. UNHCR warned that 2020 is likely to end with one of the lowest levels of resettlement in nearly two decades.
Since 2012 UNHCR has refused to be involved in refugee status determination and resettlement on Manus Island and Nauru, arguing that offshore processing undermines the refugee convention and asylum seekers should be assessed in Australia.
It has remained a strident critic of the Australian government’s policy. In 2017, when the first refugees were transferred to the US under the deal struck with the Obama administration, the then-representative, Thomas Albrecht, described offshore processing as “an abject failure”.
