Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner has warned that proposed changes to the Migration Act could undermine human rights and place Australia at odds with its international legal obligations.
The federal government introduced a bill in Parliament earlier this week to amend the Migration Act 1958 (Cth), including measures that would allow certain non‑citizens to be removed to third countries without being afforded procedural fairness.
Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay said: ‘These amendments strip away one of the most basic legal protections of a fair society: the right to be heard. They would allow the government to remove someone to a third country without giving them a meaningful opportunity to respond to a decision that has significant consequences for their life, safety, health and family.
‘Procedural fairness is a cornerstone of our legal system and a safeguard against error. Expressly removing it from decisions about third country transfers risks serious harm and sets a troubling precedent.
‘The proposed laws also seek to retrospectively validate relevant visa decisions, which may give rise to retrospective criminal liability. This raises significant concerns about the rule of law and requires careful scrutiny.
‘These changes must be carefully examined by the Parliament to ensure they do not undermine Australia’s human rights obligations. Fairness should never be optional.’
The package is the latest step in the government’s response to recent High Court rulings, including the 2023 decision in NZYQ that found indefinite immigration detention unconstitutional. That judgment led to the release of hundreds of people who could not be returned to their countries of origin and prompted successive legislative changes, among them provisions enabling the government to fund “third country reception arrangements”.
‘These amendments need to be seen in their broader context,’ Commissioner Finlay said.
‘Rather than a patchwork of reactive responses, we need to ensure principled migration and asylum policies that maintain the integrity of Australia’s migration system while also upholding our human rights obligations.’
The bill is expected to face close scrutiny in Parliament, with legal and human rights implications likely to be a focal point for committee review and debate. The government has been positioning its reforms as part of a broader effort to manage the legal fallout from the High Court’s decisions while maintaining the operation of the migration system.
