Australia ‘returned asylum seekers on one-way-trip boats’

Australia has begun putting seaborne asylum seekers on to boats pre­programmed with GPS co-ordinates that carry them back to their departure point without Australian personnel travelling on board, the Indonesian authorities have said.
Indonesian police found two boats carrying 44 men — 36 Bangladeshis and eight Rohingyas, who had left the country in June — grounded on its southernmost landfall, Rote Island, on Monday. Authorities said that Australia had sent the men back in aluminium boats whose navigation systems had been programmed with the co-ordinates of the island.
The boats were supplied with just enough fuel and provisions to make the journey from Australia’s northern waters to Rote Island. The men said they had tried to reach Australia from Indonesia’s southern coast but had been intercepted by an Australian Border Force (ABF) vessel, on which they were detained for 18 days.
They said that they were then told to board new, Australia-supplied boats after ABF personnel destroyed the wooden craft they had use to travel from Indonesia. Mardiono — Rote Island’s police chief, who, like many Indonesians, goes by a single name — said the ABF instructed the asylum seekers to ‘take this boat … to Rote, back to Indonesia’,” he told The Australian newspaper yesterday.
“When we checked the boats, they’ve run out of everything so they had no other choice than to land.”Mardiono added: “I think [the Australian authorities] have calculated how much fuel they need to get here.” The ABF refused to confirm or deny an expanded “push-back” policy.
Australia has a longstanding policy that denies settlement to any asylum seekers arriving on small craft. In 2014, under the government of Tony Abbott, the former conservative prime minister, a small number of asylum seekers were returned to Java in submersible lifeboats.
Before that, the Abbott government had intended to return asylum seekers on more traditional vessels, but the craft failed marine safety tests. Since late 2012 the government has also forced people seeking asylum into “offshore processing centres” in the tiny Pacific state of Nauru and, formerly, in Papua New Guinea. More than 4,000 people have been sent to these centres.
The reintroduction of the turnback policy using larger craft would suggest that concern is mounting within Anthony Albanese’s government over a fresh wave of people-smuggler vessels arriving from Indonesia, carrying mostly Bangladeshi, Rohingya and Chinese nationals.
Under international law, Australia has no right to intercept and turn back boats on the high seas without the consent of the country in which a boat is registered.
The latest turnbacks are the third and fourth to have occurred within the last month. At least another four boats have made landfall in Australia, including two that arrived on the remote Western Australia coast and another in the Torres Strait between northern Australia and Papua New Guinea.
Under international law, Australia has no right to intercept and turn back boats on the high seas (seas are not part of any country’s jurisdiction) without the consent of the country in which a boat is registered. If the reports are correct, Australia appears to be circumventing the provision by transferring asylum seekers to its northernmost waters, around the territory Ashmore Reef, before putting them in boats for their return to Indonesia.