High Court dismisses case brought by Iranian man
The court this morning was really following on from an earlier ruling that had made a little while ago, the infamous NZYQ case. Now, in that case earlier, the court determined that it wasn’t lawful to detain people indefinitely in immigration detention when there was no reasonable prospect of them being able to be deported or returned to a home country that where even if they were not owed asylum protection or if there were other issues that meant they weren’t legally here but if they couldn’t be deported. Then they shouldn’t be kept indefinitely in immigration detention. Now, this case that the High Court ruled on this morning, a case known as a SF 17, related to a man who couldn’t be deported to Iran because he was refusing to cooperate with the process. So he’s here unlawfully in the country, isn’t owed protection, is has exhausted his appeals processes and should be deported to Iran. But to make that process happen, he needs to get in touch with Iranian authorities, and he’s been refusing to do so. So the High Court was asked to consider in this case, is it OK? Is it lawful to keep him in detention given there’s no prospect from leaving because of his own actions? Now, the court today ruled that the no. That that there isn’t an issue with keeping him in immigration detention because he could reasonably be deported in the foreseeable future if he were to take steps to enable that to happen. So the High Court dismissed this case from AS F-17 as he’s known. And that has been quite a significant clarification of the limits of the previous ruling about unlawful detention. This is exactly what Andrew Giles and his colleagues were hoping for. They were very concerned that if the High Court had accepted this case and said that even though this individual was refusing to cooperate with the deportation process, that that meant he couldn’t be held in detention while that was happening, that there would be many others who could be released, possibly more than another hundred. The government welcomes this decision of the court because we’ve always held this view. And I want to make this very clear, if you have no right to stay in Australia, if you have committed a crime in Australia and you are not owed protection by Australia, we have the right to remove you from this country. And we will continue to work to make our migration system better, stronger and also fairer. The dismissal of this case means that that cohort can now legally be detained, which they hope will put pressure on those individuals to cooperate with the process, to be in touch with their countries of origin, to try and bring about their return to their place of origin.