The Tamil family who won a long battle to avoid being deported from Australia say new laws introduced by the Albanian government would have imprisoned them with two girls separated from their parents.
Priya Nadaraj and Nades Murugappan fled Sri Lanka as asylum seekers in 2018 before meeting in Australia and having their two daughters, Kopika Nadesalingam and Tharnicaa Nadesalingam, while living in the central Queensland town of Biloela.
Nadaraja said the federal government’s proposed laws would have imprisoned her and her husband as they fought deportation with their snatched children.
Priya Nadaraj (pictured right) says her family could have been imprisoned under new laws proposed by the Albanian government.
“This shouldn’t happen to other people like us,” he said. the alphabeth.
‘In 2019, when the last government put my family on a plane to Sri Lanka, we were terrified.
‘We didn’t know what would happen to us in Sri Lanka and we couldn’t leave our community here in ‘Bilo’.
“We fight to keep our family and community together.”
Under the new laws, which respond to an imminent High Court decision that could release 200 unwanted detainees across Australia, people who refuse to cooperate with attempts to deport them can face up to five years in prison.
Simone Cameron, who led the campaign that finally allowed the Tamil family to stay in 2022, said Australians would find the new laws unacceptable.
“No one in the Australian community should accept this cruelty being committed against their friends, their co-workers or their neighbours,” he said.
“The Albanian government must put an end to this cruelty and withdraw this bill.”
The bill, which is stalled in parliament after the government tried to rush it through in March, would also give Immigration Minister Andrew Giles the power to ban travel from countries that have rejected deportation from Australia.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil called the extra powers “common sense” and said they are needed to force people to cooperate with authorities “when they have no right to be here.”
After a long fight with immigration authorities, which almost led to the family being deported to Sri Lanka, they finally won the right to remain in Australia in 2022.
The powers would help the government avoid the embarrassment of the High Court releasing another 200 unwanted people from its immigration detention centre.
This would follow the High Court’s decision in November to release 154 indefinitely detained people who could not be deported to their countries of origin for various reasons.
One of those released, Kuwait-born Majid Jamshidi Doukoshkan, 43, has been charged for his alleged role in a violent home invasion that left Perth grandmother Ninette Simmons, 73, with serious facial injuries.
Other released detainees have been arrested for a range of crimes across the country, putting intense political pressure on the Albanian government to demonstrate that they are keeping the country safe from foreign-born criminals.
However, there are serious fears that the proposed new laws could affect thousands of people living in the community on bridging visas.
Human Rights Law Center senior attorney Laura John told a Senate committee that the bill could not pass because it violated human rights.
“It confers virtually unlimited power on the Immigration Minister to compel any visa holder to assist with their own deportation, regardless of their age, health or connections to Australia,” he said.
‘There continues an alarming trend of using the immigration system to criminalize people based on their visa status, with a penalty that is totally disproportionate to the benign conduct it seeks to punish.
“It creates unprecedented, unilateral and unchecked power for the minister to impose a travel ban, separating families and excluding entire countries from people on the grounds of their nationality.”
Priya Nadaraj and Nades Murugappan and their children were held in immigration detention centers in 2018 when their transitional visas expired and they were found not to meet Australia’s refugee requirements.
They were nearly deported in August 2019 and had even boarded a plane back to Sri Lanka when a painstaking court order managed to keep them in Australia.
Following a sustained campaign, including by Biloela residents who had come to regard the family as locals, they were returned to the city in 2022 and granted permanent residency.
