Australia has “no arrangement” to bring Australian women and children home from Syrian detention camps, the government has told the federal court, despite official correspondence citing a “plan to repatriate further groups of women and children”.
Save the Children Australia is acting as guardian for 11 Australian women and their 20 children – currently held in detention camps in north-east Syria.
Save the Children has argued before court that Australia has de facto control of the Australians’ detention, citing its previous successful repatriation missions of other women and children from Syrian camps, and the acquiescence of authorities in Syria to Australians being returned.
The government maintains it has no effective control of the Australians’ detention, and that their incarceration is the bailiwick of the Syrian authorities who physically hold them.
The Australians are the wives, widows and children of slain or jailed Islamic State fighters: most have been held in the squalid Roj detention camp in north-east Syria for four years. None has been charged with a crime, but some women may face charges upon being returned to Australia.
Several of the children were born in the camp and know no life outside it. Conditions are “dire”, the Red Cross says, illness and malnutrition is rife and the security situation “extremely volatile”.
The Australians’ “situation is stark and dire,” Peter Morrissey SC, acting for Save the Children, told the court Tuesday morning.
He said the women and children were held in “piteous and appalling conditions … their health, safety and dignity are seriously compromised”.
The first day of hearing before justice Mark Moshinsky in the federal court in Melbourne heard from Dfat officials and a naval rear admiral about Australia’s ongoing role in Syria as part of a coalition allied against Islamic State, and its control, or influence, over the ongoing detention of Australians.
Cited in evidence was a file note written by Marc Innes-Brown, an Australian ambassador who held a role, the court heard, as “special envoy” charged with liaising over repatriations with the authority in control of north-east Syria, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).
In the note to senior Dfat officials sent in October last year, a fortnight after the last repatriation of Australians from Roj camp, Innes-Brown wrote he had discussed with AANES foreign relations officials “the plan to repatriate further groups of women and children”.
Innes-Brown has not been called to give evidence in this case.
Submissions from the commonwealth argue that the Australian women and children held in Roj camp in north Syria went to the country of their own volition.
“There is no evidence that they were compelled by the commonwealth [of Australia] to travel to Syria. Their travel occurred despite Australian Government warnings not to travel there.”
The government submissions argue “there is no dispute that the AANES is detaining the women and children in its own right and not as the agent of the Commonwealth”.
It said Australia did not hand the women and children to the AANES, nor did it have them in its custody beforehand.
The government has argued “there is no existing arrangement” for the Australians’ release and return to Australia. The government, however, agrees, that if it were to request the AANES release the Australians into its custody, the AANES “is likely to say ‘yes’”.
Australia has undertaken two repatriation missions from the camps in north-east Syria. In 2019, eight orphaned children, including a pregnant teenager, were returned to New South Wales from the camps.
Last October, four women and 13 children were brought back, also to NSW.
