စစ္မႈထမ္းေဟာင္းမ်ားသုိ႔

ဘန္ေကာက္ ၾသစီသံရုံးေကာင္ဆယ္လာ

အားလုံးသိပါေစဆုိတဲ့ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္နဲ႔အခုတင္ျပပါတယ္။ နယ္စပ္က ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းေတြကေန ၾသစေတ်းလ်ႏုိင္ငံကုိေခၚတဲ့ေနရာမွာ ဘာေတြလုိအပ္လဲ။ ၾသစီကဘယ္ေလာက္ေခၚလဲဆုိတာကုိသိသေလာက္တင္ျပပါ့မယ္။

ၾသဂုတ္လ ၁၈ ရက္ေန႔မွာ ၾသစေတ်းလ်ႏုိင္ငံ Immigration ၀န္ႀကီး ျဖစ္တဲ့ ခရစ္အီဗင္ဆီကုိ က်ေနာ္စာတစ္ေစာင္ေရးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ့္အေဖနဲ႔အေမကုိ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းကေနၾသစီေရာက္ဖုိ႔ က်ဳိးစားေနတာ သုံးႏွစ္နီးပါးရွိပါေတာ့မယ္။ သူတုိ႕ UNHCR ကေန ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္အသိိအမွတ္မျပဳေသးပါဘူး။ ၾကာလည္းၾကာပီဆုိေတာ့ လုိရမယ္မယ္ရ ဘန္ေကာက္က ၾသစီသံရုံးကုိေလွ်ာက္လႊာပုိ႔ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ပုိ႔ၿပီး ႏွစ္လအၾကာမွာေတာ့ သံရုံးက က်ေနာ့္အေဖရဲ ႔ေလွ်ာက္လႊာကုိ လက္မခံေၾကာင္းအေၾကာင္းၾကားစာေရာက္လာပါတယ္။ ထုံးစံအတုိင္း တင္း,ၿပီး ဘာ့ေၾကာင့္ အဲလုိလုပ္ရတာလဲဆုိၿပီး ခရစ္အီဗင္ဆီကုိစာတစ္ေစာင္ေရးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ တျခား၀န္ႀကီးေတြဆီကုိလည္း အခ်က္အလက္နဲ႔ မိတၱဴေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ၀န္ႀကီးက ဘန္ေကာက္ၾသစီသံရုံးေကာင္ဆယ္လာကုိ လွမ္းၿပီး ဘုန္းေက်ာ္ဆီကုိ ငါ့ကုိယ္စားစာျပန္ေရးပါဆုိလို႔ ေအာက္ပါအတုိင္းေရးလာပါတယ္။

စာမွာပါတဲ့အေၾကာင္းအရာကေတာ့ အျပည့္အစုံဘာသာျပန္မေနေတာ့ပါဘူး။ အဓိကအခ်က္ေတြကုိတင္ျပပါ့မယ္။

၁) ထုိင္းအစုိးရက ဒုကၡသည္တစ္ေယာက္အျဖစ္ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳခံရမွ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံထဲကေနထြက္ခြာခြင့္ျပဳပါတယ္။ ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္အသိအမွတ္ျပဳမခံရရင္ တတိယႏုိင္ငံေတြကုိ လုံး၀ထြက္လုိ႔မရပါ။

၂) ၂၀၀၈-၀၉ ခုႏွစ္မွာ ၾသစီက ဒုကၡသည္ဦးေရ သုံးေသာင္းခြဲလက္ခံခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံကေတာ့ ၄၀၀၀ ေလာက္ပါတယ္။

၃) ဘယ္ေလာက္ပဲ ၾသစီသံရုံးက ျငင္းဆုိစာ(Refused Letter) ရရ၊ ေလွ်ာက္လႊာကုိ အခ်က္အလက္ျပန္ေျပာင္းၿပီး တင္ႏုိင္ပါေၾကာင္း၊ လက္ခံပါေၾကာင္း အေၾကာင္းၾကားတယ္ေပါ့။

ထူးျခားတာတခုကေတာ့ ၾသစီသံရုံးကေန စစ္မႈေထာင္းေဟာင္းေတြကုိ လုံး၀ ၾသစီကုိ အေျခခ်ခြင့္ ပိတ္ပင္ထားတယ္လုိ႔ထင္ပါတယ္။ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းေတြကေန စစ္မႈထမ္းေဟာင္းေတြ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္မဲ့ေနပါတယ္။ ဒီကိစၥကုိ က်ေနာ္အခု ေလာ္ဘီလုပ္ေနပါတယ္။ ၾသစီက ၀န္ႀကီးေတြ၊ အရာရွိေတြ အထိေရာက္ေအာင္တင္ျပေနပါတယ္။ ဒါ့ေၾကာင့္ စစ္မႈထမ္းေဟာင္းေတြမွန္သမွ် က်ေနာ့္ဆီကုိ အေၾကာင္းၾကားေစခ်င္ပါတယ္။

Dear Mr Kyaw

Thank you for your email dated 18 August 2010 to , concerning a decision made by the Australian Embassy Bangkok on your father’s humanitarian visa application. The Minister has asked me to respond on his behalf, as the matter you raised falls within my responsibilities as Minister Counsellor, Department of Immigration and Citizenship, East Asia region.

Unfortunately, the letter sent to Mr San Lwin, your father, care of you, did not fully detail the reasons for refusal. Your Australian citizenship is not in question and was not a factor in the decision made to refuse your father’s application. I apologise for any confusion the refusal letter may have caused, and am attaching a revised letter relating to your father’s application. Please disregard the previous letter.

I appreciate that you are concerned for your father and are disappointed that his refugee application was refused. I can assure you that full consideration was given to the claims put forward and that Mr San Lwin’s claims were comprehensively assessed by an experienced decision-maker.

When a decision is taken to refuse a humanitarian visa, it is because the decision-maker was not satisfied that the applicant had compelling reasons for the grant of a visa. This does not mean that the claims of your father were not accepted or that the difficult circumstances he experienced were not acknowledged. This is inevitably a difficult assessment to make given that many people are in very compelling circumstances.

It may assist to understand the visa decision if I give an overview of Australia’s Humanitarian Program and how people are selected to come to Australia on humanitarian grounds.

The Australian Government operates a global and non-discriminatory Humanitarian Program. The Program is designed to assist those who are subject to persecution or substantial discrimination amounting to a gross violation of their human rights in their home country and who demonstrate the greatest need of resettlement.

As you can appreciate, many more people apply to be resettled under the Humanitarian Program than Australia can accept. For example, in 2008–09 around 34 500 people were proposed under the Special Humanitarian Program (SHP) category and around 4 500 people were granted visas overseas. Most SHP applicants have close family in Australia and have suffered some form of discrimination or persecution, however, the limited number of visas available means that only those with the most compelling reasons for resettlement can be granted a visa. Inevitably a large number of those who apply will be disappointed.

It is recognised that most applicants for a humanitarian visa are suffering some form of discrimination. However, given the limited number of visas available under the Humanitarian Program, every effort is made to assist those in greatest need of resettlement. The greatest priority is given to those people assessed as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and referred to Australia for resettlement, and applicants who are proposed by an immediate family member, such as a spouse or dependant child, in Australia.

I note that your father does not have official refugee status in Thailand. You may be aware that the Royal Thai government is responsible for granting this status to Burmese refugees in Thailand. The Royal Thai government has made it clear over the past few years that exit permission will not be granted to any refugees who do not have refugee status. Without this exit permission, it is simply impossible for a Burmese national such as your father, to be re-settled in a third country.

I understand that you wish to have your father’s application reviewed, however as the attached refusal letter states, this decision is not open to review or appeal. It is open for your father to re-apply at any time, and his application will be assessed against the various factors mentioned in this letter. Without pre-empting a decision, any further application is not likely to be successful unless new information significantly adds to the claims already made. The refugee registration process and the issue of exit permission (as detailed in the paragraph above) are other factors to consider if your father decides to lodge a new refugee application.

Further information on Australia’s Humanitarian and Migration Programs, including the application forms, is available on the Department’s website:
www.immi.gov.au/immigration.htm.

I trust that this information is of assistance to you.

Yours sincerely


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Simon De Vere
Minister - Counsellor (Immigration) a.i.
Acting Regional Director (East Asia)
Australian Embassy
37 South Sathorn, Bangkok
e: simon.devere@dfat.gov.au