Canberra ready to send asylum seekers home to Vietnam

Countries to strike another deal over boat arrivals

CANBERRA // The Australian government said yesterday that a boat carrying dozens of Vietnamese asylum seekers intercepted close to the north-west coast could be sent back to Vietnam.

Some fled Vietnam after their fishing boat was sunk by the Chinese navy near the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, a refugee advocate said. A wooden boat carrying men, women and children was spotted by the crew of an oil tanker on Monday within Australia’s offshore oil and gas fields off the north-western port of Dampier.

The Western Australia state government on Tuesday confirmed that a police boat had intercepted the asylum seekers at sea and watched over them until a navy ship arrived. Border protection minister Peter Dutton would release no details of the asylum seekers yesterday, citing a government policy of secrecy surrounding its responses to such boat arrivals.

He said his government would strike a second diplomatic deal this year with Vietnam to send boat arrivals home if they prove not to be genuine refugees.

“If it is safe to do so and we have met our international obligations and we don’t owe people protection, then those people will go back to their country of origin,” Mr Dutton said. “People who seek an economic outcome are not true refugees and just because somebody is on a boat does not mean they are a refugee.”

Rights groups complained that Australia secretly held a group of 46 Vietnamese asylum seekers on a warship at sea for almost a month and rejected their refugee claims during interviews that took as little as 40 minutes before returning them all to Vietnam in April.

The United Nations’ refugee agency questioned whether refugee applications can be properly judged at sea. Doan Viet Trung, a member of the human rights group Voice Australia, said that the mother of a 16-year-old boy among the latest asylum seekers, had told him from Vietnam that about 45 people were aboard the boat.

They left the province of Binh Thuan on July 2 on their 5,200 kilometre voyage to Australia. Mr Doan said he did not know the detail of their refugee claims but that they included 11 fishermen whose boat had been sunk by the Chinese near the Spratly Islands and who were then rescued by another Vietnamese fishing boat.

The fishermen had requested Vietnamese government protection to return to the Spratlys but none was offered, Mr Doan said.