Email your Senators now and tell them you want to see a more compassionate approach to refugees in Australia.

This week in the Senate, the Albanese Government will try to pass a package of three cruel migration bills: the Deportation and Surveillance Bill, the Mobile Phone Ban Bill, and the Entry Ban and Deportation Bill. Amnesty has grave concerns about the bills, and their rushed introduction in the last sitting week of the year, not allowing for proper debate.

The bills are a cruel attempt to expand Ministerial and Government powers, including to: use punitive monitoring and surveillance; strip-search people in detention; ban mobile phones; detain and deport people to third counties; jail people for not cooperating; reverse protection findings; and ban visa applications by almost all nationals of certain countries.

Together, they will make disastrous and devastating changes to Australia’s refugee policy.

Amnesty is deeply concerned these bills will impact on refugees’ human rights. They risk serious non-compliance with the Refugee Convention and other international law.

The bills:

1. Deportation and Surveillance Bill. If passed, the Migration Amendment Bill 2024 and Migration Amendment (Bridging Visa Conditions) Regulations 2024 will:

  • Increase the Minister’s power to overturn protection findings to remove people
  • Allow the Government to pay third countries to warehouse refugees
  • Empower the Government to deport people to countries where they may be at risk of human rights abuses, persecution, arbitrary detention and death
  • Separate families, including Australian children from their parents, permanently
  • Re-introduce punitive curfews and electronic monitoring for BVR holders.

Amnesty expressed concern in a response when this bill and regulations were introduced. For more detail please refer to the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC) Explainer on the bill.

2. Mobile Phone Ban Bill. If passed, the Migration Amendment (Prohibiting Items in Immigration Detention Facilities) Bill 2024 will:

  • Allow the Minister to determine an item, including a mobile phone, is prohibited
  • Give detention officers new powers to search people, including strip searches
  • Allow the Minister to issue blanket orders e.g. search and seize all mobile phones
  • Interfere with people in detention using mobiles to communicate with family
  • Make it hard for people in detention to film their treatment and share it, contact advocates and lawyers, access health treatment and organize protests.

For more detail see HRLC’s Explainer: Albanese Government’s Mobile Phone Ban Bill.

3. Deportation and Entry Ban Bill. First introduced in March 2024, this bill was likened to Donald Trump’s 2017 ‘Muslim ban’ and failed in the Senate. Now, the Government is trying to pass the same bill again. If passed, the Migration Amendment (Removal and Other Measures) Bill 2024 will:

  • Criminalise non-cooperation with removal – such as failing to sign a document
  • Impose mandatory 12-months sentences and up to 5 years’ imprisonment
  • Allow the Minister to arbitrarily reverse a person’s protection finding
  • Prohibit any type of visa applications from almost all nationals of certain countries.

Amnesty spoke out against this bill and its breach of Australia’s international obligations.

This package of cruel bills will impact on the following human rights:

🕯 Right to seek asylum and be granted protection, not to be punished for doing so

🕯 Non-refoulment – right not to be returned to a country to face persecution

🕯 Protection from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment

🕯 Freedom from arbitrary detention, torture, arbitrary deprivation of life, death penalty

🕯 Right to adequate housing, healthcare, education & employment

🕯 Right to privacy and bodily integrity – invasive strip searches

🕯 Right to family relationships and maintaining connection

🕯 Implied right to political communication.

Amnesty International is calling on our members and supporters to contact their Senators and ensure they reject this rushed and cruel package of bills: the Deportation and Surveillance Bill, the Mobile Phone Ban Bill, and the Deportation and Entry Ban Bill.