Asylum-seekers ‘abused in prison’
Terrifying jail experiences await vulnerable arrivals, writes Helen King.
because of the cost of staying in port, and were due to meet another boat somewhere north of New Zealand.
‘‘I said ‘I can get you free ice for ballast’, but they said ‘no, we just want to go’.’’
Campbell dismisses Taukitoku’s claims about the Kainga.
He confirms the boat left port with outdated flares but says he’d offered to replace them. The Tongans said not to worry because there were new ones on the vessel they were to rendezvous with.
The Kainga was not required to have a liferaft, he says, but he gave Taukitoku one anyway. It was due for a service and should have been surveyed for international waters, but the Tongans didn’t want to pay for that.
There was a near-new VHF radio on board, Campbell says, but the crew also needed a single-side band (SSB) radio for international calls and were having trouble finding one.
Again, he was not required to have an SSB radio for New Zealand but had an old one in his shed which he gifted to the crew. It would have needed replacing when they got to Tonga.
As for the holes Taukitoku found in the hull – Campbell says small holes in steel hulls are common, ‘‘no biggie’’, and fixed with a drop of weld.
He’s ‘‘baffled’’ about what went wrong with the batteries, as he’d recently spent $3000 installing new ones.
‘‘There’s really not much chance the batteries can go flat. The only way . . . is if they’ve changed something around and wired the lighting off the starting bank batteries.’’
Ship broker Godfrey Wilson, owner of Maritime International which has sold four of the boats to Tongans (including the Kainga), says to the best of his knowledge there have been no serious problems with any of the vessels. They were all certified.
‘‘In all cases the vessels were inspected by the buyers or buyers’ representatives immediately prior to purchase. Any issues were sorted out at that time.’’
Wilson says it’s a ‘‘good news story’’ because the boats give the Tongans an opportunity to move on from open boat fishing.
‘‘They should provide them with increased safety and by allowing greater time at sea, give them the opportunity to catch more fish and The money was already deposited, if I disagree with it, my deposit was gone, and my expenses, so I decided to buy the boat. increase income.’’
Grey District mayor Tony Kokshoorn says as independent inshore fishers have been squeezed out of the market by bigger operators, ports around New Zealand have filled up with old fishing boats no-one wants.
‘‘Some of these boats are not capable of getting to Tonga – it’s not just the hull, it’s the motors. We’ve got boats down there that have been sitting there for five to 10 years and haven’t gone anywhere.’’
Kokshoorn says Maritime NZ needs to put rules in place.
‘‘Motors are going to pack up, there’s no doubt about that. If we don’t do something about this you’re basically condoning people are going to drown out there.’’
Aroom at the back of the Ministry of Infrastructure in Nuku’alofa is home to staff of the marine department, set up after the Princess Ashika – an unseaworthy Japanese-built vessel – sank in 2009, claiming 74 lives.
The small team’s job is to improve Tonga’s maritime safety
but it’s not easy because legislation continues to lag behind. New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is helping draft new laws which are likely to go before Parliament soon.
Meleami Tualau, head of the department, says there are concerns about the age and condition of boats coming from New Zealand.
‘‘They need to be of better quality, but currently in Tonga we don’t have regulations to limit those types of boats. Currently we are allowing any kind of boats, subject to seaworthiness.’’
Tualau says her department issues a provisional certificate allowing a vessel to sail from New Zealand under a Tongan flag – as long as it meets New Zealand requirements.
Cesar Dewindt, a technical adviser for the department, says Maritime NZ should be getting involved.
‘‘Even if it’s a change of flag, your maritime department has to inspect the boat – and give a waiver for one voyage to come here. They must ensure the boat is fit for that voyage.’’
But Maritime NZ’s chief executive, Keith Manch, says that’s not the case – international law states a vessel is the responsibility of the country to which it’s flagged.
The way Maritime NZ approaches the issue is to help Pacific countries like Tonga with their ‘‘capability building’’ to raise standards, he says.
Keith Ingram, a maritime consultant and editor of Professional Skipper magazine, says Maritime NZ’s response is a ‘‘cop-out’’.
‘‘They need to be educating at the Tongan end that if you buy boats in New Zealand, they’ve got to be well-found and seaworthy and you’ve got to pass a prevoyage inspection.’’
Ingram says old boats have been going up to the Pacific ‘‘to die’’ for decades.
‘‘They haven’t got the money to buy proper ocean-going boats so they’re coming down and buying 50-year-old cast-offs from New Zealand.
‘‘Why are these fellas selling them? Because they’re no longer efficient, they’ve reached the end of their working lives.
‘‘So you either sell it into the pleasure market or you sell it to the Pacific and it goes up there and dies.’’ ‘‘When I went to the police station they took me to a cell and gave me a mattress. There were cockroaches crawling and biting me, I thought to myself this is similar to a police station in Afghanistan!’’
It’s just after midnight at Auckland International Airport when an asylum seeker, whom we will refer to as Khalid, arrives in late August 2012.
His eyes scan the arrivals area. He finds a policeman and declares he is here to seek asylum.
‘‘After they searched me I was taken into a room and questioned. I was so exhausted. It took about two hours.
‘‘I thought they’d let me go at this point but they told me they couldn’t let me walk around the streets.’’
Khalid was told he’d be taken to prison. ‘‘My expectation was when I provided some documents and told the truth I would be taken to a refugee camp but they sent me to the police station where I spent the night.’’
In 2012 the Taliban carried out some of their most intensive attacks on foreign embassies in the Afghanistan capital, Kabul, where Khalid had worked as a translator for the British Embassy for five years.
‘‘That day, when the embassy was under attack, it was very serious. We were kept underground for five or six hours, we were watching rockets going over the building.’’
Following the embassy attack Khalid was targeted.
‘‘It was some sort of intimidation, a sort of warning. They tried to enter my house and threw things through the windows at night.’’
Khalid took his wife and children and moved in with his brother.
Immigration’s northern compliance manager, Alistair Murray, says asylum-seekers can be detained if there are identity concerns.
‘‘We can’t say with any certainty that they can be released into the community because they might represent a threat to the community.’’
Information obtained through the Official Information Act revealed there are now 11 asylumseekers holed up in Mt Eden prison, and their average length of stay is four months.
Immigration New Zealand statistics show there were 269 claims for asylum between 2016 and 2017, and 71 of those claims were approved.
Rebecca Hamilton, an Australian human rights lawyer who teaches at American University’s Washington College of Law, says every country has the right to detain anyone for a brief moment of time to determine their identity.
‘‘The emphasis here is it’s a limited time, it shouldn’t be for months and months.’’
She adds that when the UN convention on refugees was created after World War II there was an understanding detainment was an exceptional case.
‘‘Even 11 out of the 71 asylumseekers New Zealand took last year is a lot, the absolute number might not sound as bad compared to the numbers on Manus Island or Nauru but percentage-wise it’s not insignificant.’’
Amnesty International is also concerned by the practice. New Zealand chief executive Grant Bayldon says the Government should avoid holding asylumseekers in prison-based detention.
‘‘They need to do a far better job. If people are detained we should be making sure they have good access to lawyers and interpreters, we need to make sure they’re not detained alongside remand prisoners and convicted criminals,’’ Bayldon says.
Auckland immigration lawyer John McBride believes one of the
We need to make sure they’re not detained alongside remand prisoners and convicted criminals. Amnesty International major issues is that only a few lawyers have the expertise to represent asylum-seekers.
‘‘The legal aid available for asylum-seeker cases is minimal, it’s not enough to cover the amount of time required to put a case together. You need to spend hours to gather the information required to put together a case. It can be a battle to get the prison to allow you to bring in a laptop and it can take two full days of talking to get the full picture of what is happening.’’
Asylum-seeker status is reassessed every 28 days and, if necessary, a new warrant of commitment is issued. An Auckland District lawyer, who asked not to be named, told the Sunday Star-Times that when asylum-seekers appear in court there is often no one arguing against their detention.
‘‘In some cases asylum-seekers are being represented by criminal lawyers who don’t know anything about immigration law. Recently there was a situation where a refugee lawyer had to be courtordered to turn up for her client after not doing so for several appearances.’’
The Refugee Council experiences similar difficulties accessing asylum-seekers, says president Dr Arif Saied. It has been fighting for regular visits but has yet to be granted them.
After his first appearance at the Manukau District Court, Khalid was taken to Auckland Central Remand Prison, Mt Eden.
He quickly realised the only way to survive was to attach to a stronger person.
‘‘There was an Egyptian guy, a bodybuilder, he was a big guy. I befriended him so I had someone to protect me,’’ Khalid remembers.
His experience in New Zealand isn’t unique. Auckland immigration lawyer Ioana Uca is representing a man who was allegedly assaulted by another inmate.
‘‘He’s a small guy, from a Muslim country and he was sharing a cell with a man on a charge of double homicide. He was so scared of him. Always asking permission to move around the cell,’’ Uca said.
‘‘I have tired, broken people who don’t know what to do, the system is flawed and broken. I don’t believe these people should be in prison, they’re being abused by other prisoners. They’re vulnerable people. To be honest there is no other way.’’
There’s conflict in Khalid’s voice as he explains why he used a false passport to leave Afghanistan.
‘‘I had a UK visa, I could have gone there very easily. But the encouragement of my aunt who was already in New Zealand helped make my mind up. I didn’t want to be disloyal to the embassy because as an employee I didn’t want to misuse the visa they had given me.’’
Murray says incorrect documentation is not uncommon.
‘‘The issue is identity and if we can establish identity in another way, then the false documents aren’t the determining factor in the decision-making.’’
When asked if asylum-seekers are a risk to the community, Khalid pauses in consideration.
‘‘Generally the people who want to escape their country, they were in a critical situation and want to escape. They shouldn’t be a threat or pose a threat to the community. It’s difficult to say 100 per cent but overall those who manage to come are people who have worked for foreigners, they got money, a good job. Because it’s difficult for a poor person to pay $10,000 in order to get a passport.’’
Murray couldn’t comment on individual cases. But he says that hypothetically speaking, the issue is trying to figure out exactly who the person is.
‘‘As a part of the decisionmaking process we would consider if they tried to conceal their true identity when they arrived or if they tried to mislead authorities.’’
Khalid believes there is an alternative to detaining asylumseekers. ‘‘I know the Government is worried about people coming in but I think the solution for that is to have a special facility because when someone comes to New Zealand and is put in prison with criminals it isn’t a good impression.’’