SYDNEY (Pacific Media Watch / The Age / Inclusive Development International): A prominent human rights lawyer has criticised the Australian government's decision to resettle some Manus Island and Nauru asylum seekers in Cambodia.
Writing in The Age newspaper, Dr Natalie Bugalski, legal director of Inclusive Development International and a well-known Australian human rights lawyer, said Cambodia had "neither the resources – nor the human rights record – to guarantee the proper resettlement of these asylum seekers".
Bugalski said there were more than 20,000 Cambodian citizens who had been forcibly removed from their land to make way for a A$25 million AusAID railway project in 2010 and since the the Cambodian government was not even able to take care of them, it was highly unlikely that it could cope with an influx of asylum seekers.
"As one of Cambodia’s largest donors, Australia should be using its leverage to ensure that the victims of the railway project are properly compensated and assisted. The last thing we should be doing is palming off refugees who fled to Australia’s shores for safe haven to a country that doesn’t even care for its own displaced people," she wrote.
The urban Cambodian families had been "dumped" on rural plots of land where they could not get any work and were now "trapped in a cycle of debt and unemployment. Many fear losing their land a second time", Bugalski wrote.
Many of the Cambodians who were forcibly removed now live in "refugee camp" settlements "surrounded by empty fields and piles of trash", Bugalski said. Some have taken out loans to rebuild new houses on the land they were allocated but face losing their homes again as they are unable to meet repayments.
Inclusive Development International is now representing the families in a complaint to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) after an internal ADB report said the displaced people should be compensated with up to $4 million, after finding that the bank had pushed "many households into a debt trap' and was also "at least partly responsible for the death of the two children".
"The Asian Development Bank’s board of directors has ordered the lender to implement the report’s recommendations. However, it has encountered fierce resistance from the Cambodian government, which refuses to compensate the evicted families and write off the debts incurred", Bugalski wrote.
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