Australia refugee decision splits family

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock said Australia will not provide boatpeople the same rights accorded to legal refugees

SYDNEY, Australia -- An Afghan refugee faces separation from his wife and five children whose asylum applications were rejected by Australian authorities.

Roqiah Bakhtiyari and her children, aged 5 to 13, are facing deportation from Australia despite the fact her husband, Ali Asqar Bakhtiyari, had been granted permanent refugee status by authorities.

The Refugee Review Tribunal rejected her application because it was not convinced she was an Afghan.

"She had very little knowledge of what was happening around the village she was supposed to be living in, didn't know the currency used," a spokesman for Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock told Reuters news agency.

Linguistic experts also believed she spoke a dialect more common in Pakistan.

The tribunal's decision underscores Australia's temporary protection visas introduced in 1999 in an effort to stem the influx of asylum seekers arriving in the country illegally.

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Refugee protection groups have criticized the visa, arguing it does not provide the level of protection guaranteed by international conventions to asylum seekers.

Inconsistency

Lawyers for the family, who are being held in the Woomera refugee camp in the desert in South Australia, say they are baffled by the tribunal's contradictory decision to recognize Ali Asqar Bakhtiyari as an Afghan refugee but to reject his family.

"The husband was accepted on his first interview and now we're going through this mediaeval cruelty of his family being rejected," lawyer Nick Poynder told the Australian Herald Sun newspaper.

It is believed the husband arrived some time before the rest of his family.

Poynder argued the woman was illiterate and lived in a village where money was rare and goods were bartered.

But Ruddock's spokesman said there were too many disparities in her knowledge of her village for illiteracy to be the cause.

The Bakhtiyaris have already appealed to Ruddock to reverse the tribunal's decision, and allow her and her children the right to stay with her husband in Australia.

Only the minister can override Refugee Review Tribunal decisions.

The spokesman told Reuters news agency Ruddock had already made a decision but it would not be made public until the family was informed.

'Largesse'

Ruddock's spokesman said Australia was more than happy to meet its obligations towards refugees but only when they went through the proper legal channels.

However, he warned the government will not provide the same "largesse" to boatpeople who jump refugee queues.

Thousands of people, mostly from Afghanistan, escape poverty and persecution by paying small fortunes to people smugglers to take them to developed nations such as Australia.

But Australia has suspended its Afghan refugee processing in line with some other countries following the fall of the Taliban, while it evaluates the new situation in Afghanistan.