‘Too Prosperous?’ Indonesian Responses to Australian Asylum-seeker Policies

Foreign citizens without legal documents or awaiting deportation are held in the Karantina Imigrasi or Immigration Quarantine supposedly a place of temporary detention. There is, however, no effective time limit on detention and no working formal method of case review. There is also a lack of clear and routinely-followed guidelines as to how asylum-seekers should be dealt with. Indonesia has not yet signed the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 and its 1967 protocol, so the government will not consider applications for asylum (Roberts, 2001: 28). This leaves the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) branch in Jakarta as the only processing point but there is much confusion as to whether, and, if so, exactly when, the UNCHR or IOM (International Organization for Migration) should be involved (Roberts, 2001:28)