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Australia embroiled in war crimes/visa row

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 December 2005, 02:05 CST

By Michael Perry

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Nine people refused refugee protection visas by Australia in the past five years on the grounds they had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity are still living in the country, officials said on Tuesday.

Immigration officials said a total of 23 people had been refused protection visas because of war crimes or crimes against humanity but only two had been deported, nine left voluntarily and three remained in immigration detention.

The other nine were living freely in Australia awaiting appeals, an immigration spokesman told Reuters.

"Records currently indicate that 23 people have been excluded from receiving protection visas under Article 1F (A) (C) of the refugees convention between 2000 and the present," he said.

Those involved came from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, Tibet, Nigeria, Chile, Iran, Iraq and India, the spokesman said.

But the department refused on privacy grounds to say whether any of the cases had been referred to police.

The Sydney Morning Herald published an investigation on Tuesday, headlined "Australia's War Crimes Fiasco," alleging that the immigration department had "repeatedly failed to call" police to investigate confessions of atrocities by asylum seekers.

It said Australian Federal Police had confirmed that of 15 war crimes allegations it had received in the past eight years none had come from the immigration department.

"I don't want us to be a safe haven for war criminals," Tony Burke, Labor opposition spokesman on immigration, told Reuters.

"If someone has committed atrocities overseas the police ought to know about it. If the immigration department has any information establishing that, or even leading to that, (the minister) should be responsible to pass the information on."

The government has said it informs police where appropriate.

SADDAM BODYGUARD

On Monday, the government confirmed that a former bodyguard of Iraq's Saddam Hussein was living in Australia after winning an appeal against the rejection of his protection visa application.

It said it was reviewing Oday Adnan Al Tekriti's case.

The Herald broke the news that Tekriti had been in Australia since arriving illegally by boat in 1999, sparking criticism from Labor that the immigration system was failing.

The newspaper's revelations saw a former U.N. war crimes investigator claim that Australia's failure to prosecute war criminals had left it with a reputation as a safe haven.

"I believe that Australia has a reputation amongst those who have been involved in war crimes as a safe haven," Graham Blewitt, a former deputy prosecutor at the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, told Australian radio on Monday.

"You are not going to be prosecuted (in Australia) and frankly that is a reputation that Australia should not be prepared to wear," Blewitt said.

Australia has been criticized in the past for not pursuing alleged war criminals more vigorously. The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center has charged Australia with a "loss of political will" to bring local Nazis to justice.

Australia has tried unsuccessfully to prosecute a handful of aging, suspected Nazi war criminals. The country disbanded its war crimes unit in 1993 -- at the time a former war crimes prosecutor said the unit was investigating 20-25 cases.

War crimes investigators believe war criminals arrived in Australia as part of a wave of post-World War Two immigration.

Last week the Wiesenthal Center asked the Hungarian government to launch an investigation into the World War Two activities of a Hungarian living in Melbourne. It said he had held an "important position" in the fascist Arrow Cross movement which persecuted and murdered Jews in Hungary in 1944 and 1945.

Australian media reported last week that Croatia had launched a war crimes investigation into a Yugoslav migrant living in Australia. The man has told local media he fought on the Serbian side in the Balkans war of the 1990s, but denied killing civilians and torturing prisoners of war.

Source: REUTERS

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