Stuck in the System

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Su

ch pressures may help explain the complaints often heard among asylum seekers about the quality of the advice they get from migration agents. The former review tribunal member says she often saw agents concocting evidence and inserting it into their client's claim, sometimes without the knowledge of an illiterate or non-English-speaking asylum seeker. Refugee advocates say that sloppy advice and in some cases neglect continue to hurt asylum seekers' chances. One detainee now entering his sixth year at Baxter was assured by his migration agent that she would submit key evidence to the tribunal before a decision on his case was made. When a friend rang to check on the case, she was told that the agent had failed to file the evidence and was no longer with the firm. The tribunal rejected the man's claim; he is now waiting in detention for a court appeal. "We hear about them all the time," says Ngareta Rossell, a Sydney-based refugee advocate who has extensive contacts within detention centers. "Many asylum seekers feel they have been taken for a big ride."

Concerns about the quality of agents are being addressed through a compulsory examination introduced just over a year ago, says David Mawson, ceo of the Migration Institute of Australia, a division of which registers migration agents. Complaints against 2% of the 3,300 agents nationwide are upheld each year. "The visa applicant may or may not tell the migration agent everything, and the agents themselves may in some circumstances embellish what they are told," says Mawson. Sometimes, he says, people don't tell their stories in full because they don't trust the migration agent. If an asylum seeker's application is rejected, there is no government funding for appeals to the courts. Applicants must find a lawyer themselves - in most cases, one who is willing to take their case pro bono. For someone in a detention center whose English is poor, this tends to be a haphazard process, says Nick Poynder: "It's just luck." Barrister Claire O'Connor says she's not allowed to visit an unrepresented detainee unless she has a written invitation from them. But she can visit prisons, "where anyone can come and ask for my help." Without legal advice, an asylum seeker has little chance of succeeding in an appeal, says immigration lawyer Nick McNally: "There are a whole range of issues which are very complex legally, and it's a minefield even for lawyers."

Instead, the task of helping detainees regularly falls to the volunteers who make up a mushrooming support network. These people often become not only a detainee's only regular link with the outside world but their de facto case managers, investigators and lobbyists. Many spend hours every week finding everything from lawyers to medical advice, tracking down evidence to support asylum seekers' claims and lobbying for action on languishing cases. When lawyers are too busy to visit clients, or too far from remote detention centers, advocates frequently make the trip instead. "We do the legwork," says advocate Rossell. When Farhad's court appeal was being prepared, Bernadette Wauchope, of Port Pirie, South Australia, and another volunteer from Byron Bay, on the north coast of New South Wales, spent more than 130 hours collecting evidence that would eventually verify his claims. "The people who succeed are those who have Australian people going in there and helping them untangle the mess," says Rossell.

Without the volunteers, says migration agent and advocate Naleya Everson, "there are a lot of people who would not have got out" of detention. But when the detainees' hopes rest so heavily on non-professionals, most of them with little training, or on lawyers trying to fit cases in around their daily jobs, the danger is that "mistakes are inevitable," says lawyer O'Connor. That can hardly be reassuring to those among the nearly 900 men, women and children in detention who are still waiting for a decision on their future.